Two Lancaster students were charged with 59 counts of sexual abuse after allegedly creating AI nude photos of classmates

Two male students at a Lancaster private school have been charged with 59 counts each of sexual abuse of children and possession of child pornography after allegedly using artificial intelligence to create hundreds of nude images of female classmates.

The charges, announced Thursday by the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office, came as Lancaster Country Day School has been facing mounting pressure over its response to the deepfakes, which were shared on a social platform and have caused turmoil in the private school community. Both the head of school and board president resigned last month, a day after parents filed a lawsuit.

The incident is the latest scandal involving manipulated social media images to test area schools. Earlier this year, middle school students in the Great Valley School District drew national attention for creating 22 fake TikTok accounts impersonating their teachers, some with sexual depictions. The district said it was limited in its ability to respond.

In announcing the charges against the Lancaster students — identified only as “juvenile males” — Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams said no charges would be filed against the school. Despite receiving a tip about the nude images in November 2023, school officials were not required “under the letter of the law to report the incident to ChildLine,” the state’s hotline for suspected child abuse, Adams said in a statement. School officials also never notified police.

Instead, parents contacted the police in May, reporting that nude images had been created of their daughters.

A mother who spoke to The Inquirer said that she had learned of the situation when she picked her daughter up from school and found her crying.

“She said, ‘Mom, there’s naked pictures of me at school,’” said the mother, who requested anonymity to protect her daughter’s identity. She said she contacted her daughter’s principal, and told her that if the school wasn’t going to contact the police, she would.

The mother initially learned of about 10 other girls at the school who had been victimized, with photos taken from social media and then altered with artificial intelligence to add nude body parts.

The images of her daughter looked “very real, very much like her body,” the mother said. Someone who didn’t know what had happened could think they were real photos, she said.

As police investigated, the number of victims grew. Adams said Thursday that 60 victims had been identified, 48 of whom were students at Lancaster Country Day School. (One victim was over the age of 18.)

The two defendants possessed and altered “hundreds of images of Lancaster Country Day School students, which they digitally altered using an artificial intelligence application to make the images appear pornographic,” according to the district attorney’s office.

“The number of victims involved in this case is troubling, and the trauma that they have endured in learning that their privacy has been violated in this manner is unimaginable,” Adams said in a statement. “The method of abuse here is novel, but the impact on the victims is the same as in any case of child exploitation. It has a deeply harmful effect on the lives it touches.”

A spokesperson for the DA noted the office has charged “at least one other case in the past where the subject generated AI porn involving underage victims as part of the images.”

Adams said the defendants had shared the images with each other on the Discord social media platform; in total, police found 347 images and videos.

That platform is how the images first came to light in November 2023, when one of the defendants “sent one of the altered images to a different chat room that consisted of other Lancaster Country Day School students, apparently in error,” according to Adams’ office. That month, someone contacted Pennsylvania’s Safe2Say tip line, which solicits anonymous tips about school safety concerns.

While the school received that tip, “there was no criminal failure on behalf of any school employee to report suspected child abuse as it is currently defined by our laws,” the district attorney’s office said. It said that though school officials are required to report child abuse, “child-on-child harm is exempted” from that definition.

Lancaster Country Day School’s board of trustees said in a statement Friday that it had cooperated with authorities throughout the investigation, and that its “highest priority remains caring for our community and providing support for those who have been impacted by this troubling situation.”

The charges provide a “sense of relief,” the victim’s mother who spoke to The Inquirer said Friday. But she felt administrators had done “nothing to stop the continued abuse” of students after the November 2023 tip, enabling the creation of hundreds of images.

The parent lawsuit against the school is ongoing, the mother said. In a Nov. 11 letter to school leaders, the parents’ lawyer, Matthew Faranda-Diedrich, requested they hire a “full-time certified resource officer trained in these matters” and retain an IT forensics firm, “to determine where precisely the offending images have been sent” and may exist online.

The school’s board declined to comment on the lawsuit, but said that for the past few weeks, the school has had outside mental health professionals who are trauma specialists on campus daily, offering support at no cost to students.

Adams, the district attorney, noted that Pennsylvania had recently passed laws to define the possession and distribution of AI-generated child pornography as a felony. “Given the broad reach of AI and the harm that can be done as evidenced here, I would urge the legislators to further consider amending our mandatory reporting laws to also include the reporting of AI child pornography,” she said.