Deepfakes are destroying reputations with little more than one click
A 27-year-old former teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan was arraigned on charges of producing explicit images of minors earlier this week. According to Grand Rapids police, the images were altered with AI. This was not Plato’s vision when he said, “the city is the man writ large against the sky,” yet the problem of deepfakes is indeed growing at massive scale.
The European Union launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot after the Centre for Countering Digital Hate released a report that Grok’s newly released “one click” editing feature resulted in the platform generating nearly 3 million sexualized images of women and children in mere days. When major tech platforms can be exploited at this scale, the implications for society are staggering.
What’s deeply concerning is that industry experts saw this coming. Hari Fareed, Professor at University of California, Berkley warned, “In the era of deepfakes, a liar is equipped with a double-fisted weapon of both spreading lies and, using the specter of deepfakes, casting doubt on the veracity of any inconvenient truths—the so-called liar’s dividend.” Yet, here we are.
Children are being raised in a world where platforms enable ‘editing’ features that significantly lower the barrier of entry. Deepfake creations, what was once something limited to highly skilled users, has now become ubiquitous enabling users of all ages to generate anything they can imagine.
The Victims Are Overwhelmingly Female
One Texas teenager, Elliston Berry, knows this reality all too well. At just 14 years old, she discovered that a classmate had created and shared deepfake nude images of her. Now 16, Berry is turning her trauma into powerful action by helping to develop a training course for schools. Her description of the response she received is chilling but all too common. School leaders “were more confused than we were, so they weren’t able to offer any comfort, any protection to us.”
Girls and young women are bearing the brunt of this technological assault. When AI-generated nude images swept through a Louisiana middle school this fall, female students were the primary targets. Two boys were eventually charged, but not before one of the victims was expelled for physically confronting her alleged harasser. This is yet another tragic example of how schools, unprepared for this new reality, don’t know how to support the victims through these traumatic experiences.
This confusion isn’t surprising. According to research published in April 2025 by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), half of educators surveyed report receiving little to no training on deepfakes. All the while savvy students have easy access to apps that can transform innocent photos into explicit content with just a few taps and simple prompts like “remove her clothes.”
He Who Steals My Good Name
It’s not just students who are vulnerable. The ease of creating convincing audio and video deepfakes has made teachers and administrators prime targets as well. In one high-profile case from Baltimore, an athletic director created a fake audio recording of his principal making racist and antisemitic remarks. Shared more than 27,000 times, the recording destroyed the principal’s reputation and divided the school community. Then forensic experts confirmed it was fake, but until the truth came out, the principal had faced threats to his physical safety, leaving his family living in fear. Even after his exoneration, the damage to his reputation was done. I’m reminded of the words of Iago in William Shakespeare’s Othello.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; tis something, nothing;
Twas mine, tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
When adults in positions of authority can be so easily framed and the technology is sophisticated enough to fool not just the general public but even administrators, we’re facing a crisis of trust that threatens the very foundation of our educational institutions.
What Schools Must Do Now
Schools must act with urgency and operate under the assumption that deepfakes will affect their community. Prepare accordingly, which means updating codes of conduct with specific consequences for AI misuse, implementing comprehensive training programs for staff and students, and creating clear protocols for responding to incidents.
But perhaps most importantly, schools need to foster open communication. As Berry emphasizes, students need to know they can report these incidents without fear of punishment or having their devices confiscated. Parents need to have honest conversations with their children about the real-world harm these “pranks” cause.
When teenage girls live in fear of seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves circulated among their peers, when principals can be framed for hate speech with a few seconds of fake audio society confronting a fundamental threat to the safety, dignity, and trust that should define public education.
The question is no longer whether deepfakes will affect your school. It’s whether your school will be ready when they do. Read more about legislation advancements and tips from The Social Institute should you ever become the victim of a deepfake.