Exclusive | Teenagers, teachers victims of disgusting fake AI nudes and the perpetrators are barely being punished
Elliston Berry woke up on an October morning during her freshman year of high school to a text from her friend.She was frantic.Photos of the two of them without clothes were circulating around their school.
But Berry had never sent anyone a nude photo.Someone had generated the images with artificial intelligence.Neither girl knew what to do.“I was completely, completely shocked,” Berry, then 14, told The Post.
“I was crying all morning, and I couldn’t even come out of my bedroom.”This nightmare scenario is, sadly, becoming common across the US as people misuse AI to create images which are getting ever more realistic.The Post has spoken to teenage victims, teachers and parents who have all been affected by this sick phenomenon, which schools and cops seem to have little power to stem or punish.
At first, Berry, who is now 16, was frightened and resolved to keep the matter to herself, hoping she could make it go away.“I didn’t want to tell my parents,” she said.“They have always told me about why it’s so important not to send nudes, so if there’s this AI nude of me, I don’t want my parents to think that this is what I’m doing.”But ultimately Berry’s mother got the truth out — and took her straight to the principal’s office to get to the bottom of it.“As I went through school, I was completely embarrassed.
I was ashamed.It felt like everyone was looking at me,” Berry said.
“I was convinced my entire school had seen the images.”The Fort Worth, Texas, school opened up an investigation, but the perpetrator continued to target more and more girls over the course of the week, attaching threats to the images.He declared that he wanted to “ruin the girls” and to “go out with a bang.”“I was scared for my safety,” Berry said.
“I didn’t know the intention behind these images.I didn’t know why he sent them out.”The perpetrator erred five days into the smear campaign, when he logged into the Snapchat account he ...