Washington, United States:
A fabricated audio clip from a US high school principal has sparked an outpouring of outrage, leaving him facing accusations of racism and anti-Semitism in a case that has raised new alarms about AI manipulation.
Police have charged a disgruntled staff member at the Maryland school with fabricating the recording that surfaced in January — allegedly of principal Eric Eiswert railing against Jews and “ungrateful black children” — using artificial intelligence.
The clip, which sent Pikesville High School administrators a flood of angry phone calls and threats, underscores the ease with which widely available AI and editing tools can be abused to impersonate celebrities and ordinary citizens.
In a year of major elections worldwide, including in the United States, the episode also shows the dangers of realistic deepfakes as the law catches up.
“You need one image to put a person in a video, you need 30 seconds of audio to clone someone's voice,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. , to AFP.
'You can hardly do anything unless you hide under a rock.
“The threat vector has moved from the Joe Bidens and the Taylor Swifts of the world to school principals, 15-year-olds, reporters, lawyers, bosses, grandmothers. Everyone is vulnerable now.”
Following the official investigation, the school's athletic director, Dazhon Darien, 31, was arrested late last month over the clip.
Documents show that Pikesville High School employees felt unsafe after the audio surfaced. Teachers feared the campus was bugged with recording equipment, while abusive messages lit up Eiswert's social media.
“The world would be a better place if you were on the other side of the Earth,” an X user wrote to Eiswert.
Eiswert, who did not respond to AFP's request for comment, was placed on leave by the school and required security at his home.
'Injury'
When the shooting surfaced on social media in January, spurred by a popular Instagram account whose posts attracted thousands of comments, the crisis thrust the school into the national spotlight.
The audio was amplified by activist DeRay McKesson, who demanded Eiswert's resignation to his nearly one million followers on X. When the allegations came to light, he admitted he had been fooled.
“I remain concerned about the harm these actions have caused,” said Billy Burke, executive director of the union representing Eiswert, referring to the recording.
The manipulation comes as several US schools have struggled to curb AI-enabled deepfake pornography, leading to student harassment in the absence of federal legislation.
Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger said at a news conference that the Pikesville incident highlights the need to “bring the law up to date with technology.”
His office is prosecuting Darien on four charges, including disrupting school activities.
'One million clients'
Investigators partially linked the audio to the athletic director by connecting him to the email address that initially distributed the audio.
Police say the alleged defamation was in retaliation for an investigation Eiswert opened in December into whether Darien authorized an illegal payment to a coach who was also his roommate.
Darien searched the school's network for AI tools before the audio came out, and according to the charging documents, he used “large language models.”
A University of Colorado professor who analyzed the audio for police concluded that it contained “traces of AI-generated content with human editing afterwards.”
Investigators also consulted Farid, writing that the California expert found it “was doctored and that multiple recordings were linked together using unknown software.”
AI-generated content — and especially audio, which experts say is particularly difficult to spot — sparked national alarm in January when a fake robocall posing as Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote during the state's primaries.
“It affects everything from entire economies to democracies to the high school principal,” Farid said of the technology's misuse.
Eiswert's case has shaken Pikesville and revealed how misinformation can roil even “a very tight-knit community,” said Parker Bratton, the school's golf coach.
“There's one president. There's a million directors. People say, 'What does this mean for me? What are the possible consequences for me if someone decides he wants to end my career?'”
“We will never be able to escape this story.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)