If teachers thought rampant cheating was the worst way AI would impact their livelihoods, we’ve got some bad news.
On social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Wired reports, teenagers are using AI to create videos that ruthlessly mock their school’s faculty, sometimes even attacking their reputation, with one video flippantly labeling a teacher a “predator.”
The “slander pages” that post the videos often use “looksmaxxing” lingo to denigrate the teachers, the reporting noted. Some posts receive over one hundred thousand likes, becoming a viral “in-joke” that’s cruelly blasted out to countless strangers on the internet.
Where AI comes into the picture is how the students use controversial tools like Viggle AI to insert a photo of their teacher into scenes or to lip-sync their faces. In one now-removed “slander” video made with Viggle, Wired found, a teacher’s face is superimposed onto someone twitching in a bathroom. A text overlay reads, “Take fent or be useless,” referring to a fentanyl overdose.
Many of the “slander page” videos are equal parts edgy and bizarre. One posted by an account called “thewyliefiles” shows a school superintendent from the Wylie Independent School District in Collin County, Texas, lip-syncing a love song with deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, garnering more than 107,000 likes.
Some verge into extremism. Another video shows teachers being let into, or denied access to, “Agartha,” a fictional kingdom inside the Earth that’s recently been revived as a central piece of neo-Nazi mythology in young online circles.
School faculty are horrified by the depictions.
“While we understand that some students may be exploring AI tools or engaging with social media trends, this should never come at the expense of our educators’ reputations or create content that is misleading or disruptive to the learning environment,” chief communications officer for the Wylie Independent School District April Cunningham told Wired, vowing that the students responsible “will face disciplinary action and possible legal consequences.”
The trend is the latest way that AI and other deepfake-esque technology is used to depict people in compromising scenarios without their consent. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok generated a storm of controversy when it was used to produce thousands of AI nudes and sexualized images of real people, including some who were minors. OpenAI’s AI video generating app Sora 2 was used to mock dead celebrities. The Trump administration frequently uses AI imagery to disparage and taunt its political enemies, like sharing AI “Ghibli-style” memes of immigrants crying while being deported.
Making fun of hard-nosed teachers is a time-honored tradition among teens. But in an age of social media, pranks and in-jokes quickly break containment, and there’s a “deep technological disconnect” between what students might see as harmless fun and the consequences of blasting these memes to thousands of strangers online, Geert Lovink, a professor and director of the Institute of Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam, told Wired.
İdil Galip, who researches memes at the University of Amsterdam, said the teens were socialized in a culture defined by a “constant churn of content,” where “your face isn’t yours, it’s the viewer’s, it’s the commenter’s to laugh about.”
“We’re seeing these knock-on effects of what happens when people are socialized through the internet and also see themselves reflected through the internet rather than a mirror,” she told Wired.
That disconnect seems to be on display how the anonymous high school student behind “thewylefiles” account defended his slander page to Wired, claiming that his videos — which include one accusing a teacher of being a “predator” and a “cuck” — are “satirical.” He even maintained that he’s worried about the teacher’s safety, despite stating that his goal is to grow his slander page “as big as possible.”
“If you’re just trying to harass someone for the sake of harassment; that’s just not cool,” he told Wired. “We don’t want them to be doxed. We don’t want them to be stalked. We don’t want them to be prank called.”
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