Two boys made deepfake porn of 60 girls. It left a school, small town reeling

A small Pennsylvania town was rocked by an AI deepfake porn scandal. As these platforms evolve, school policies, legal recourse and awareness lag far behind.

LANCASTER, PA – It's hard to describe the city of Lancaster as anything other than quaint. Its vibrant but small downtown is peppered with coffee shops, bookstores and friendly locals. It has charm in abundance. The same can be said for the upscale Lancaster Country Day School, a K-12 private school in the area that hosts just over 600 kids. They frolic around in matching uniforms and play on crisp green grass once school lets out.

Perhaps that's why the AI-generated sexual abuse scandal that recently rocked this town came as such a shock. No one saw it coming. 

Only that's not exactly true. Students did. 

One student, in particular, was sent a pornographic deepfake of his upper school classmate on the communications app Discord, apparently in error. He deleted the photo, left the group chat, and filed an anonymous report to a state-run tip line, which in turn reported it to the school. But the school failed to act, according to lawyers representing at least 10 families. 

Over the next six months, two boys at the school continued to make AI-generated content of other girls.