Fifty Bacchus Marsh Grammar girls targeted with AI fake nudes

A teenage male has been arrested after fake nude images of 50 girls at a regional Victorian private school were shared on social media.

Faces of the girls, in years 9 to 12 at Bacchus Marsh Grammar, were used in images of nudes generated by artificial intelligence and put on Instagram, then shared by students on Snapchat, the school has confirmed.

The school has confirmed police are investigating the sharing of fake nudes generated by artificial intelligence.Credit: Justin McManus

Acting principal Kevin Richardson said the school had been informed by parents of the mass creation of fake nude images of their daughters, and the reports had been passed onto police.

Victoria Police confirmed it was investigating reports of explicit images being circulated online and that officers had been told a number of these were sent to a person in the Melton area via an online platform on June 7.

In a statement on Tuesday night, police said a teenage male had been arrested over the incident and released pending further inquiries.

Richardson said the school did not know yet if the images featuring the faces of a “large number of students” on AI-generated bodies had been created by students at the school, or if someone else had made them.

“It may well be students,” he said, adding that the students targeted were experiencing “a range of emotions”.

The school became aware on Monday that the images of the girls had been lifted from their social media accounts, and their fake nudes were being shared.

Cybersafety expert and former policewoman Susan McLean said the targeting of the girls was disgusting and could cause long-term harm.

She said police should consider charging those responsible: “A slap on the wrist won’t cut it,” McLean said.

“Not a week goes by that we’re not getting headlines like this. It’s always women that are being targeted in this way. The level of disrespect to young women is appalling.”

A 15-year-old student from Catholic boys’ school Salesian College, in Chadstone, was expelled last week for producing deepfake, explicit images of a teacher at the school, using AI, the Herald Sun reported.

A deepfake is an image or video in which a person’s face or body has been digitally altered to make it appear they are somebody else, or they are doing or saying something that never actually happened.

Creating them of fellow students is considered a new form of bullying, and was first noted to be happening in Australia last year. In October, the national eSafety office warned schools to overhaul their safety policies after the phenomenon arrived in Australian schools from the US.

The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman-Grant, warned that the first reported cases were just the tip of the iceberg.

In a statement on Tuesday, Bacchus Marsh Grammar said video content that included images of students from the school had been produced and circulated, and the school was taking the matter very seriously. “The wellbeing of Bacchus Marsh Grammar students and their families is of paramount importance to the school and is being addressed.”

Richardson said the school was offering support to girls and their families, and that should Bacchus Marsh Grammar students be discovered to have been the source of the images, appropriate action would be taken.

McLean said the parents of young people creating deepfake explicit images had to take responsibility for their children’s actions.

“You have a responsibility for making sure your child isn’t inflicting harm on anyone else,” she said.

Sharing digitally altered deepfake pornographic images could attract a jail term of up to six years, or seven years for those who also created them, under new laws announced by federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus this month.

Dreyfus said at the time that digitally created and altered sexually explicit material was a deeply distressing form of abuse, particularly against women and girls.

McLean said that such serious consequences should be considered for those who had created the fake nude images of the Bacchus Marsh girls, saying “sharing child abuse images can be a jailable offence”.

With Lachlan Abbott

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