A 13-year-old girl at a Louisiana middle school got into a fight with classmates who were sharing AI-generated nude images of her
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
The article states that the police investigated but found nothing. The kids knew how to hide/erase the evidence.
Are we really surprised, though? Police are about as effective at digital sleuthing as they are at de-escalation.
The article later states that they continued investigating, and found ten people (eight girls and two adults) who were targeted with multiple images. They charged two boys with creating and distributing the images.
It’s easy to jump on the ACAB bandwagon, but real in-depth investigation takes time. Time for things like court subpoenas and warrants, to compel companies like Snapchat to turn over message and image histories (which they do save, contrary to popular belief). The school stopped investigating once they discovered the kids were using Snapchat (which automatically hides message history) but police continued investigating and got ahold of the offending messages and images.
That being said, only charging the two kids isn’t really enough. They should charge every kid who received the images and forwarded them. Receiving the images by itself shouldn’t be punished, because you can’t control what other people spontaneously send you… But if they forwarded the images to others, they distributed child porn.
You should have kept reading.
"Ultimately, the weeks-long investigation at the school in Thibodaux, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southwest of New Orleans, uncovered AI-generated nude images of eight female middle school students and two adults, the district and sheriff’s office said in a joint statement.”
Unless they can pull out their gun and shoot at something or someone … or tackle someone … they aren’t very good at doing anything else.