Luis DeSantiago was pouring coffee when he learned that someone had turned him into a deepfake.
The date was March 12. DeSantiago, a substitute teacher from Los Banos, California, was on shift at his other part-time job when his phone lit up. A coworker behind the counter told him an AI image of him was making the rounds on social media. Her cousin wanted to know whether it was really him.
At first he shrugged it off. Inappropriate photos breach TikTok’s community guidelines, he assumed, and content like that usually disappears quickly.
Then the image reached him.
“When I finally saw the image, that’s when it felt like a punch to the gut,” DeSantiago said. Pieces of it resembled a mirror selfie he remembered taking at a job back in college. The work uniform was gone, though. In its place was lingerie and a suggestive pose, nothing like the way he had actually been standing in the real photo.
Those text messages set off an ordeal that would stretch across months and pull in two schools, students, administrators and the police.
Four educators, one recurring pattern
DeSantiago’s case is not unusual. Three other educators described students allegedly producing sexualized photos and videos of them, most likely with AI. They called the experience deeply distressing and disappointing. For some of them, it reshaped how they view their own work and how they relate to the kids in their classrooms.
DeSantiago ran his own investigation. One of the accounts spreading the image listed a real name in its TikTok profile, and that name belonged to a student he knew from the local middle school where he regularly filled in. Judging by who followed and engaged with that account, together with what he understood about student friend groups, he came to suspect two other students were involved.
He was booked to work at that very middle school the following day.
He brought it to the assistant principal, who told him the school would “take care of it.” Later that evening, a search of his own name on TikTok turned up something new: another student had set up an account impersonating him, using a slightly misspelled version of his name and the same photo as the profile picture.
The picture spread regardless
What came next, according to DeSantiago, was weeks of back-and-forth involving administrators, parents and police.
“If these students aren’t afraid of generating and posting these images of me, I am concerned of what they may be circulating privately through text messages and group chats,” he wrote to the principal. “Keep in mind this could include other students as well.”
A student confessed to creating the image and was given in-school suspension. DeSantiago was told afterward that the picture had also gone out on Snapchat. The spread continued. Additional students posted it. Crude sexual comments began appearing on his own TikTok account.
He informed administrators that he wanted no assignments at the middle school “until this matter is fully addressed.” The district did not respond to a request for comment.
He picked up a substitute assignment at the local high school instead. The image traveled with him. In the middle of one class, an AirDrop carrying the same AI-generated photo appeared on his phone before it was rapidly revoked. He could tell it was circulating among the students seated in front of him.
The principal told him the school was opening an “immediate investigation” and offered either a meeting or access to the school counselor. DeSantiago said he probably will not go back to the district this year. As things stand, he said, he does not feel safe doing so.
The law has teeth. Schools have no playbook
Circulating fake nude images of adults who never consented can rise to cyberstalking, and it can run afoul of the federal Take It Down Act, which criminalizes publishing nonconsensual “intimate visual depictions of individuals, both authentic and computer-generated” online.
In most of these instances, however, the teachers never flagged the content to the platforms hosting it. Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy pointed to the company’s harassment and sexual content policies, which bar sharing AI-generated or manipulated material intended to humiliate or sexually harass. Snap has “established processes” for reporting content of that kind, she said, and the company keeps working to “develop features and tools designed to support the safety, privacy, and well-being of our community.” TikTok did not provide comment before publication.
Donna Ballman, a retired employment advocacy lawyer, said that a student producing and distributing sexual images of a teacher is a “clear case” of workplace sexual harassment. Federal antidiscrimination law obliges employers to maintain a workplace free of sexual harassment. Inside a school, that could translate into disciplining the student or shifting them to a different classroom.
Yet there is “no blueprint” dictating how schools must react, Ballman said. Administrators are not even obligated to tell a targeted teacher what discipline a student received.
“They just have to make [and] create a safe environment for the victim,” Ballman said.
A teacher in her mid-twenties waits for the next one
A middle school teacher who asked to remain anonymous, because her district had not authorized her to discuss the experience, said she has encountered so much AI-generated content weaponized against teachers that she is bracing for the next round.
Students last year, she said, dug up public photos of a teacher in her sixties, doctored them to depict her committing sex acts and circulated them in a Snapchat group chat.
Several months ago, a student alerted her to a TikTok account impersonating her. The giveaways were obvious: her face carried that telltale AI smoothness, her mouth moved oddly as she spoke, and the voice was not hers. Certain videos showed her skydiving or doing backflips. Others had her describing sexual acts she had performed and enjoyed.
She reported it to her principal, who responded that they would “see what we can do.” Students kept flagging the account to her throughout the day. Several said they knew which classmate was behind it, a student with a reputation for behavioral problems.
“I know a lot of the kids that reported it to me genuinely believed that was my account, and that I was saying those things,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, you guys, that is not me.'” She urged them to report it to TikTok, and the account was taken down soon after.
The fake account was only the beginning
Still shaken, she raised the account at the next monthly teacher meeting. A colleague mentioned that he had come across an apparently AI-generated fake video of himself being arrested, which he believed originated with the same student.
In the days and weeks that followed, that student moved on to harassing her face to face, “cursing me out, calling me names, telling me to fuck off, calling me a bitch.” She brought it up again at the following faculty meeting. The assistant principal revealed that the same student had been calling and texting them in the middle of the night and posting apparent AI-generated photos of them to TikTok.
The principal removed the student from her class and worked to restrict his access to her. The harassment persisted until the student left the district and TikTok pulled the account.
She does not believe the problem begins and ends with one kid. “It’s kind of unsurprising that we are dealing with that, because these kids just have a hard time,” she said. “I’m just worried about this happening again.”
What losing her trust costs a counselor
Alice, who asked to be identified only by her first name, works at a UK college that trains students aged 16 to 19 in trades such as construction. Her role blends administrative duties, attendance among them, with college counseling. She sits down one on one with roughly 150 students a year and takes pride in serving as a sounding board, an adviser and a mentor.
This winter, administrators informed her that a student had filed a report about two videos going around among his classmates. One seemed to be genuine footage of her speaking with a student. The second looked like a doctored version of the first. In that one she was not speaking to anybody. She was undressing and dancing around in what was either underwear or a bikini.
Being a qualified youth worker, Alice said, means her job frequently involves discussing subjects students find “too embarrassed to tell their parents about,” such as drugs, parties or having safe sex. She had held several of those conversations with the student she suspected of making the video. He denied involvement when administrators questioned him, and he dropped out shortly afterward. The college did not respond to a request for comment.
“It makes me reflect as well on those conversations, thinking, did he think that he could overstep a line because we were having these discussions?” she said. “It makes you question everything.”
The college allowed her to step back from the class for a few weeks and began educating students on the harm of creating or sharing deepfakes. The room felt different when she returned.
“I did have a really good rapport with my students, I do have a good rapport with my students,” she said. The job is still one she loves. “But it’s definitely made me a bit more cautious, a bit more vigilant when it comes to folks.”
A three-day suspension, and a larger fear
Luke Red, who teaches sixth grade in Arizona, went through something much like DeSantiago’s experience. His students passed around an AI-generated photo of him in the comments of his public TikTok account, depicting him kissing another male teacher.
Red flagged the accounts to TikTok, not over content violations but because their users were below the minimum age of 13. TikTok left them up. His school opened an investigation right away and pinpointed the student in short order. The student acknowledged creating and sharing the image and was handed a three-day suspension, the harshest penalty available to students that age for a first-time sexual harassment offense under the district handbook. The district did not respond to a request for comment.
Dwelling on it “has kind of sent me into a spiral,” Red said. Not over what was done to him personally, but because of the permissive, enthusiastic culture surrounding AI among his students.
“It just got to the point where students felt comfortable enough creating inappropriate images,” Red said. “Obviously when you’re making your teachers do sexual things with these images, that’s where it crosses the line.”
In the end, he feels worse for the kids than he does for himself.
“It’s just clear [that] so many kids nowadays just don’t understand not only how what they’re doing can affect others, but just what happens on the internet and how dangerous it can be,” Red said.