One of the first schools to shut down after students were found making artificial intelligence (AI) nudes of female classmates is now asking a court to drop a lawsuit filed by victims who claimed that the school was silent for months while the boys boldly targeted more girls.
In a motion last week asking the court to end the suit, Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS) — a private K-12 school in Pennsylvania, USA, 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.
The school further argued that it was also false to say it knew that girls were being targeted 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.”
