AI is causing harm in schools! Here’s what local lawmakers are doing to crack down on deepfakes

Amanda Green is a Medfield mom of two young girls, trying to balance screen time with her kids just like most parents these days.

“You can already tell at a young age that they’re very addicted to the screen, they get very upset when they get detached from it,” said Green.

Green says her daughters are too young for social media, but she’s already worried about allowing them to use it especially now that artificial intelligence is changing the game.

“I’ve heard about risks of potentially fabricating a video and your kid gets in trouble at school and it never was them, they weren’t doing something,” said Green.

She has heard about ‘Deepfakes,’ and it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake anymore.

There are lots of deepfake videos of celebrities online, but now dozens of new AI apps make it easy for anyone to make a fake video of anyone by just using their picture.

“You can have a lot of lives ruined including the kids who make this stuff their lives can be ruined just as easily,” said Wesley Wildman, who studies AI and its impacts on society as a professor at Boston University.

He says deepfakes are becoming a problem especially when those videos include pornography.

There are several examples in schools across the country where students have created sexually explicit deepfake videos of a classmate or teacher.

“So you can’t control it, you can’t stop it, so you have to have a different approach that has to do with helping people find some psychologically positive way through that after it’s happened,” said Wildman.

Wildman says both parents and school leaders should talk to kids about how dangerous a deepfake can be.

“The damage doesn’t really consist in whether this is a true video, it consists in the reputational harm that’s caused when something like this gets out into the wild,” said Wildman. “You have to warn kids who might be inclined to experiment with this sort of thing that there could be massive implications.”

“It’s not that it’s not going to happen, I just think we haven’t seen it yet,” said Dr. James LaBillois, Assistant Superintendent of Unified Student Services for Brockton Public Schools.

Brockton Public School leaders are aware of the growing trend of deepfakes.

Dr. LaBillois says any student who makes a damaging deepfake video would be disciplined under the district’s cyberbullying policy.

“When they’re with us they’re covered by our policy and there’s a level of protection, but if they were to graduate and something were to happen the day after graduation, they would have no legal recourse,” said Dr. LaBillois.

That’s why state lawmakers are also working on bills to crack down on deepfakes.

“The one thing we’ve learned from social media is we were late to the game, and as a result, there’s been some harm done to especially young people, so we want to be ahead of the game when it comes to artificial intelligence,” said Senator Barry Finegold.

Finegold has introduced a bill to regulate deepfakes, especially during Elections.

If passed, his law would require a disclaimer on any video, saying it was made by “AI.”

Plus, there would be consequences.

“Someone can sue another person civilly up to $10,000 if they distort their image, and I think that should also carry over to normal day life if someone distorts your image, that you can have a civil penalty against them as well,” said Finegold.

While Finegold says state lawmakers are looking into creating laws around deepfakes, he believes there should be a federal law on this.

There are bills in Congress right now like the No AI Fraud Act and the Deepfakes Accountability Act, which aim to protect people’s likeness online.

If these laws pass, someone could face jail time for creating a damaging deepfake video of someone else.

Parents like Green are hopeful a law like that will pass to protect children as well.

“There’s too much risk, it’s too potentially dangerous to just let it go to the wind,” said Green.

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