Louisiana family demands answers after A.I. deepfakes target 13-year-old
A Louisiana family says sexually explicit, artificially generated images of their 13-year-old daughter and other girls circulated among male students at Sixth Ward Middle School, prompting outrage and plans for a federal lawsuit.
"It's disturbing. Those pictures are horrible. They're extremely explicit, and they look real. You cannot tell the difference,"
Joseph Daniels, the girl's father, described the emotional toll the incident has taken on his daughter after she was expelled in August for confronting and striking a boy on a bus whom she said had been sharing the images. Daniels says his daughter felt she had no choice because school officials had not acted on earlier complaints that day.
District and law-enforcement response
The Lafourche Parish School District and local law enforcement say administrators and the school resource officer opened an immediate investigation when complaints were filed. "Consistent with established policy, several students were interviewed and parents were contacted during the course of the day regarding the allegations," a joint statement from the Lafourche Parish sheriff and superintendent said. By the end of that school day, investigators said they had not located any image or direct evidence of the images' existence.
The district noted the bus altercation occurred after dismissal the same day the images were reported.
Evidence and charges
While investigating the bus incident, juvenile detectives and school resource officers later discovered A.I.-generated nude images depicting eight female middle school students and two adults, the sheriff and superintendent said. A few weeks later, one male student was charged with 10 counts of unlawful dissemination of images created by artificial intelligence; additional arrests or charges remain possible, officials said.
The family's attorney says the charged student was not suspended or expelled but was transferred to another school. The district emphasized that criminal charges can influence—but do not always determine—school disciplinary actions.
Current status and impact
The girl was allowed to return to school recently but remains on probation until at least January, which bars her from dances, sports and other extracurricular activities. Daniels said the expulsion and aftermath have affected his daughter's mental health: "She's tough, but, you know, mentally it does play on her. She dealt with depression, you know, anxiety. To me, her eighth grade year was pretty much ruined, which is her last year in middle school."
Broader concerns
A recent study by Thorn, a nonprofit child advocacy group, estimates that roughly 1 in 17 children nationwide have been targeted by A.I. deepfake pornography, underscoring how accessible the technology has become. The family's attorney, Greg Miller, warned that easy teenage access to deepfake tools will likely make such incidents more common: "There's no doubt that this is going to be a growing trend because we live in a world where 13-year-olds can get access to these kinds of software, and in a heartbeat, do this to their peers, and the public needs to be made aware of this because it's growing and it's going to get worse and worse," he said.
The family plans to pursue a federal lawsuit against the school district, seeking accountability for the handling of the complaints and the resulting disciplinary actions.
