Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

Enlarge / Westfield High School in Westfield, NJ, in 2020. (credit: Icon Sportswire / Contributor | Icon Sportswire)

This October, boys at Westfield High School in New Jersey started acting "weird," the Wall Street Journal reported. It took four days before the school found out that the boys had been using AI image generators to create and share fake nude photos of female classmates. Now, police are investigating the incident, but they're apparently working in the dark, because they currently have no access to the images to help them trace the source.

According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school "believed" that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.

It remains unclear how many students were harmed. A Westfield Public Schools spokesperson cited student confidentiality when declining to tell the WSJ the total number of students involved or how many students, if any, had been disciplined. The school had not confirmed whether faculty had reviewed the images, seemingly only notifying the female students allegedly targeted when they were identified by boys claiming to have seen the images.