An investigation has been launched at a Winnipeg high school after dozens of students were photographed naked using artificial intelligence software.
According to local media reports, students at Collège Beliveau, a secondary school for grades 9 to 12 (from the third secondary school to the first year of CEGEP in Quebec), discovered and condemned explicit photos circulating in the institution.
“The original photos appear to have been collected from public social media and explicitly altered,” principal and assistant principal Andrea Kolody and Jennifer Oldfield said in a letter to parents.
According to students who told the Winnipeg Free Press, artificial intelligence was used to create up to 300 photos featuring dozens of students' faces. However, the Louis Riel School Board, on which the college depends, did not confirm to the newspaper the number of photos in circulation.
“This is an investigation that is still in its early stages, and artificial intelligence is complicated. There are all sorts of nuances that are being developed within the law right now,” Officer Dani McKinnon, spokesman for the Winnipeg Police Service, commented to the daily.
“In the past there have been cases of revenge porn or the distribution of photos without consent. But we are talking about situations where real images were sent. “It’s about altered images generated by AI,” she added at the microphone of radio station 680 CJOB.
No charges have yet been filed in this case.
School authorities emphasized that all photos received by school management were uploaded to the Project Arachnid tool on the website cyberaide.ca, which aims to remove child pornography images from the Internet.