Perp Walk

A Spanish court has sentenced 15 teenagers to one year of probation for using AI to create fake nude images of female classmates, The Guardian reports.

The perpetrators, all aged 13 to 15, were convicted in Badajoz, Spain on 20 counts of creating child abuse images and 20 counts of "offenses against their victims' moral integrity," according to the Guardian. They were tried as minors, and their collective conviction marks one of the first in a growing pool of cases involving minors and the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual, AI-driven deepfake pornography in middle and high schools.

"The sentence notes that it has been proved," the court told the Guardian in a statement, "that the minors used artificial intelligence applications to obtain manipulated images of [other minors] by taking girls' original faces from their social media profiles and superimposing those images on the bodies of naked female bodies."

Case by Case

News of the incident surfaced last September when the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that a cohort of school-aged girls had discovered that classmates had created sexually explicit AI-generated images of them and circulated those photos throughout four schools via two WhatsApp groups.

"Mom, they say there's a naked photo of me going around," one impacted student told her mother, as quoted by El Pais. "That they did it with an artificial intelligence app. I'm scared."

At the time of the El Pais report, prosecutors were still investigating whether AI-generated nude images of minors, also generated by minors, constituted a crime. In the US and abroad, laws and regulations that shroud the use of AI to generate fake nude images often live in legal gray area — it's an obviously repugnant and invasive act that can leave lasting negative impacts on victims, but not always necessarily illegal. This grayness has also been reflected in uncertain and flat-footed school responses, which in some cases have been heavily criticized. Following a recent incident at an affluent New Jersey high school, for example, school officials were accused of attempting to sweep wrongdoing under the rug.

"It seems as though the Westfield High School administration and the district," Dorota Mani, the mother of an impacted student, at a school board meeting in March, according to an April New York Times report, "are engaging in a master class of making this incident vanish into thin air."

But as the number of incidents continues to rise, whether such incidents are considered criminal, and what punishment looks like, continues to take firmer shape. In March, Wired reported that two Miami teenagers were charged with felonies for creating AI nudes of classmates. The same month, the FBI declared that AI-generated sexual imagery of minors is indeed illegal.

Sadly, though, as laws and norms around emerging AI technologies continue to develop, we're likely to see more similar cases.

More on AI deepfakes: Police Investigating AI-Generated Nudes of New Jersey High Schoolers