If teachers thought the worst way AI would impact their lives would be to cause widespread cheating, that’s bad news.
On social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, wired Teenagers are reportedly using AI to create videos that brutally mock school teachers, sometimes attacking their reputations, with one video flippantly calling a teacher a “predator.”
The report points out that “defamation pages” that post videos often use the technical term “lookmax” to defame teachers. Some posts receive over 100,000 likes and become viral “inside jokes” that are brutally pelted by countless strangers on the internet.
This is where AI comes into play, with students using controversial tools like Viggle AI to insert a photo of their teacher into a scene or lip-sync their face. One now-deleted “defamatory” video made on Viggle says: wired It turned out that the teacher’s face was superimposed on someone twitching in the bathroom. The text overlay mentions fentanyl overdose and reads, “If you don’t take Fent, it’s useless.”
Many of the “slander page” videos are both edgy and bizarre. An account called “thewyliefiles” posted more than 107,000 likes, showing the superintendent of 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.
Some people fall into extremism. Other videos show teachers being forced into and then being denied access to Agartha, a fictional kingdom inside the Earth. Agartha has recently been revived as a central piece of neo-Nazi mythology among young online circles.
School staff are horrified by the depiction.
“We understand that some students may explore AI tools or participate in social media trends, but this should never come at the expense of an educator’s reputation or create content that is misleading or disruptive to the learning environment,” said April Cunningham, chief communications officer for the Wylie Independent School District. wiredstated that the students responsible “may face disciplinary action and legal repercussions.”
This trend is the latest way to use AI and other deepfake-like technologies to portray people in dangerous scenarios without their consent. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok sparked a storm of controversy when it was used to generate thousands of AI nude and sexual images of real people, including minors. OpenAI’s AI video generation app Sora 2 was used to mock deceased celebrities. The Trump administration frequently uses AI images to belittle and mock political opponents, such as sharing an AI “Ghibli-esque” meme of an immigrant crying while being deported.
Making fun of strict teachers is a time-honored tradition among teenagers. But in the age of social media, pranks and jokes can quickly break out of containment, and there is a “deep technological disconnect” between what students see as harmless fun and the consequences of broadcasting these memes online to thousands of strangers, said Geert Lovink, professor and director of the Network Culture Institute at the University of Amsterdam. Wired.
Idil Galip, a meme researcher at the University of Amsterdam, said teens are socialized into a culture defined by “constantly changing content” where “the face doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the viewer, and it’s the commenter’s to make fun of it.”
“We’re seeing the ripple effects of what happens when people interact through the internet and see themselves reflected through the internet rather than in the mirror,” she said. wired.
This disconnect appears to be indicative of how the anonymous high school student behind the account “thewylefiles” defended his defamatory page. wiredand claimed that his videos, which include videos in which he slams teachers as “predators” and “shitholes”, are “satirical”. He even claimed to be concerned about teachers’ safety, even though he said his goal was to grow the defamation page “as big as possible.”
“If you’re just trying to harass someone for harassment’s sake, that’s not cool,” he said. wired. “We don’t want them to post personal information. We don’t want them to stalk us. We don’t want them to make prank calls.”
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