A woman whose daughter attends Bacchus Marsh Grammar said she was sickened by fake nude images of students that were circulated online.
A teenager has been arrested after a series of explicit AI-generated images of students at the school, north-west of Melbourne, were discovered.
Victoria Police said the boy has been released pending further enquiries and its investigation is ongoing.
The school’s principal said it appeared images of about 50 girls from the school were taken from social media and manipulated with AI to create obscene images.
Parent, Emily, said she saw the images over the weekend and described them as “incredibly graphic.”
She told ABC Radio Melbourne that her daughter was very upset and was throwing up in response to the images.
“It was so graphic, I almost threw up when I saw it. It was really, really awful,” she said.
“What kind of mind wants to do that?”
Emily said girls at the school were being interviewed by police after the images came to light and the incident had had a significant impact on her daughter.
“It’s just too much. It’s too much intensity with all the images and the AI is getting out of hand and we’re obviously seeing the implications.
“There’s just this feeling of will this come up, will it happen again? It’s very traumatising.”
In a statement on Wednesday morning, the school said the students affected were being offered support.
“On behalf of the persons and families affected, Bacchus Marsh Grammar is taking this matter very seriously and has contacted Victoria Police.
“The wellbeing of Bacchus Marsh Grammar students and their families is of paramount importance to the school and is being addressed.”
AI imagery becoming more widespread
Digital safety expert Susan McLean from Cyber Safety Solutions said it was becoming increasingly easy to manipulate images online using AI technology.
“The people making them, the young people, they’re getting more brazen and it’s easy – if you go into the app store there are a number of apps you can download that create these very believable images almost instantly,” she said.
“These images are often undiscernible to the naked eye, they are very, very good and even if, in a case like this, there’s a lot of publicity and everybody knows they’re fake, that does not undo the harm.”
She called on schools to step up educational programs around cyber safety, but also said parents need to be vigilant about what their children are doing online.
“Whoever has made all these images, I would suggest did it at home on a parent’s watch,” she said.
Emily van der Nagel, who lectures in social media at Monash University, said the technology itself was not the primary area of concern.
“I think this is just an update of behaviour that we have long understood to be part of some really deeply troubling gender relationships involving adults and children,” she said.
“I feel like the education to properly address this kind of issue is not necessarily about the technology and about deepfake, it’s about the way that boys and girls and men and women relate to each other.”
Do you know someone who has been impacted by fake images? Are you concerned about what this means for your child? Share your story in the form below.
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