High school defends staying silent while boys made AI nudes of 59 classmates

Mandatory reporting loophole

Gaps in laws may help Pennsylvania high school escape AI nudes scandal.

One of the first schools to shut down after students were found making AI nudes of female classmates is now asking a court to toss a lawsuit filed by victims who claimed that the school stayed silent for months while the emboldened boys targeted many more girls.

In a motion to dismiss this week, Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS)—a private K-12 school in Pennsylvania with fewer than 600 students—argued that it was false to say the school never reported the harm to law enforcement. The tip that the school received came from the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General, which is itself a law enforcement agency, the filing said.

It’s also false to say the school knew that girls were being targeted, the school argued, because the tip did not mention any specific student victims.

LCDS said that “it looked into the tip as best as their educator training allowed,” but the tip only identified one bad actor and was too vague to identify any potential victims. At no time did the school see the images, and the school maintains that all activity connected to the AI nudes happened off-campus.

Instead of warning all parents that inappropriate AI-generated images were potentially being made, the school only interviewed the boy accused of making the image and his mother. The boy has since pled guilty with another male student but at the time denied making the AI nudes, and the mother provided no more information.

Ultimately, LCDS closed its investigation and shared results with the attorney general, then never heard back. In its motion to dismiss, the school argued that it had no duty to report the images to local police because it’s only required to report tips on actual child abuse, and AI images don’t qualify as that in the state, at least not yet.

An attorney representing the school, Rory Connaughton of Saxton Stump, told Ars that “it is impossible to assert that the school failed to report to law enforcement when law enforcement provided the tip to the school and the school reported back to law enforcement.”

“The Attorney General’s office had the discretion and legal authority to refer this matter to the local police or conduct its own investigation,” Connaughton said. “That it did not use its investigative authority or refer the matter to the local police when armed with the same information available to Lancaster Country Day School, makes clear that the school acted properly and did not fail to fulfill any legal duty.”

Ars could not reach the attorney general to comment, but a spokesperson told a local news site, Lancaster Online, that the office “does not investigate information provided in tips. Rather, the information is passed along to the relevant school and/or police to investigate the information provided.”

“Boys will be boys,” school head allegedly said

Girls suing the school argued that at least 59 girls were traumatized by “an extended, catastrophic institutional failure.” They claimed that they “were forced to go to high school while ‘deepfake’ nude images of them were circulating within the school community,” and that appallingly, Lindsay Deibler-Wallace, assistant head of Upper School, took no action to protect them after telling parents that “boys will be boys.”

The victims alleged that the school never suspended the students even after “the LCDS upper school was in a state of acute panic and disruption related to the AI-generated images.” Instead, the school allegedly discouraged girls from going to police, while withholding information from parents and obstructing efforts to investigate the distribution of AI-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM), such as by refusing to respond to detectives seeking a yearbook photo for comparison.

Two male students have since pleaded guilty to 59 felony counts of sexual abuse of children, and their victims are hoping the court will rule that LCDS was required to report the incident to police, both by law and by “reasonable institutional practice.”

Ars could not reach the victims’ lawyer for comment. However, their lawsuit emphasized that on top of emotional harms, girls targeted were also “effectively deprived” of “equal access to the educational opportunities and benefits provided by LCDS.” They’ve further accused the school of violating Title IX by being “deliberately indifferent” to sexual harassment that was “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.”

Gaps in laws may let school off the hook

Notably, another Pennsylvania school coping with AI-generated nudes on its campus did report the incident to police, according to a press release from lawmakers pushing to update the state’s law to ensure that schools always immediately report AI nudes.

In that case, a middle school student targeted 11 female classmates in deepfake images, and the school delayed contacting police until after concluding its own internal investigation.

State lawmakers argued that schools should not be delaying reporting AI nudes until their own probes end but rather should be required to promptly tip off police, who are better positioned to investigate the crimes.

Troublingly, delays in reporting can result “not only in lost evidence,” but also cause “significant trauma to the female victims,” whose images may spread further the longer the harm goes unchecked.

The press release said that lawmakers were motivated to close a loophole in a law defining child abuse that doesn’t explicitly mention AI-generated CSAM.

“This bill will make certain that law enforcement is notified at the earliest possible moment, and it makes other changes that put the wellbeing and safety of our children first,” the press release said. But that bill is not yet law, LCDS said, and is currently under review by the state Senate.

In LCDS’s motion to dismiss, the school claimed that the very fact that lawmakers are moving to update the law is proof that it had no legal obligation to report the vague tip that it received.

Specifically, they argued that “child-on-child” incidents such as these are not legally defined as abuse, since using AI to sexualize images of young girls is not among current child-on-child exceptions, such as rape or indecent exposure. To add weight to this defense, they cited Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams’ decision not to charge the school “for failing to report the AI-generated content, because possession and dissemination of AI pornography did not fall under crimes defined as child abuse.”

However, it’s unclear if that argument will hold up, since the students who made the images admitted to 59 counts of sexual abuse of a child, and the court will surely consider that. As punishment, the boys were ordered to “serve probation and perform 60 hours of community service each,” Lancaster Online reported. In their complaint, victims argued that “the tip described conduct constituting child sexual abuse” under state and federal laws—“specifically, the production and/or possession of child sexual abuse material involving minor students.”

School accused of aiding spread of AI nudes

LCDS’s attorney told Ars that only the students are criminally liable for the images and that the court should agree to leave the school out of the fight since the only alleged connection is that the boys were their students.

“What Student Plaintiffs do not allege, at any point in the Complaint, is that the images were shared in school, during school hours, or using school equipment or a school Internet connection,” LCDS’s filing said. “The sole nexus to LCDS in the Complaint is that the Student Plaintiffs and the harassers were all students of the school, but that is not enough to survive a motion to dismiss.”

Although gaps in the law may help the school escape the AI nudes scandal, its motion to dismiss did suggest that the court may not grant every demand in their filing. On aiding and abetting claims, the motion to dismiss noted that case-law is “split,” which means an unfriendly judge could side with students and leave the school on the hook for at least some liability for negligence.

However, if the judge doesn’t lean their way, LCDS argued that victims still can’t argue that the school knew the images existed or intentionally helped facilitate their spread, which the school thinks should be fatal.

For victims, the school’s response coolly denying it could have intervened sooner is likely unsurprising but still jarring. Their complaint alleged that after it became clear that the AI nudes described in the tip were real, the school failed to “provide adequate support, counseling, and resources to the victims following the abuse,” allegedly negligently inflicting emotional distress at the time when girls felt most vulnerable walking the halls.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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