Teen bullying takes a dark, high-tech turn
As artificial intelligence turns classmates into targets, schools are playing catch-up
ANOTHER VIEW| CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Every parent should be paying attention to what's been going on at Lake Zurich High School in Illinois.
In an April 2 communication to families, school officials said police are investigating allegations that students used artificial intelligence to generate and share explicit, pornographic images using the likeness of other students.
District officials have said that no staff members directly viewed the images, underscoring both the sensitivity of the material and the limits schools face once a police investigation begins. The conduct itself dates to late February, but only came to light April 2.
Kids have been bullying each other since the dawn of human existence. These allegations are diff erent. Imagine being a victim's mother or father and having to console them, to strategize how to show their face back at school, to process the feelings of violation, embarrassment and sadness that inevitably follow such exposure. Imagine being the parent of the child who did it and will have to face the consequences.
What's going on is an uncomfortable tension between two difficult truths. Victims of AI manipulation are suff ering real harm, including humiliation and lasting emotional damage. At the same time, many of the teens responsible are not fully equipped to grasp the permanence and scale of what they're doing.
Adolescent minds today have easy access to technology that can create and distribute images instantly, without clear or consistently enforced guardrails. Schools, laws and parents are still operating under rules built for a world where harmful images had to be shot, not fabricated, and where the consequences unfolded more slowly.
A key challenge in attacking the problem is the nature of teenagers. Their decision-making and maturity are still developing. In the same way we don't expect kids to drink until they're 21 or drive until they're 16, we cannot expect all teenagers to make responsible decisions with tools this powerful.
The adolescent brain isn't fully developed, resulting in a tendency toward risk-taking and lower inhibition. Couple that reality with a generation of teens who spend much of their social lives online, and it's easy to understand how bullying has gone digital.
To their credit, state lawmakers in Illinois recently updated the state's child pornography laws to include AI-generated images.
In Illinois, it's illegal to possess a photo of a naked child's body or body parts, even if the images were sent willingly. Such media is considered child sexual abuse material. Each photo or video a person possesses counts as a separate individual violation carrying the potential for hefty fines and felony charges.
Notably, the law does not exempt minors from this statute.
Schools need clear rules, parents need to have uncomfortable conversations and lawmakers need to revisit how these cases are handled when the off ender is a minor.
