Baltimore County Police arrested A former Pikesville High School athletic director accused him Thursday morning of using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswart, saying Eiswart made racist and anti-Semitic comments behind closed doors. made the people believe that.
Dazon Darien was charged in January with disrupting school activities after investigators determined he had forged his voice and circulated the audio on social media, according to the Baltimore County State's Attorney's Office. . Darien's nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clip that he allegedly forged.
Eiswart's voice, which police and AI experts believe to be simulated, was a derogatory comment about black students and the surrounding Jewish community that was widely circulated on social media.
Questions about the reliability of the audio soon followed. Police said in the indictment that Darien accessed the school's network multiple times in December and January in search of OpenAI tools and used “large-scale language models” to practice “deep learning.” did. The Internet can recognize the text you type and generate conversation results. ” They also connected Darien to his account via email that distributed the recordings.
While many current and former students believed Eisbert was responsible for the offensive remarks, former colleagues condemned the audio and defended Eisbert's character. Mr. Eiswart himself has denied making such comments, and he said his comments were inconsistent with his own views.
Audio posted to popular Instagram accounts Murder Inc. bmore sparked an investigation by Baltimore County Public Schools and the Baltimore County Police Department. Eiswart said he has not worked at the school since the investigation began.
The voice refers to “ungrateful black children who can't even pull themselves out of a paper bag” and questions how difficult it is to hold those students up to grade-level expectations.speaker using the names of people they believed to be staff members and claiming they should not have been employed; He needs to exclude others “in some way”.
“And if I have to hear one more complaint from another Jew in this community, I will join the other side,” the voice said.
Police said three teachers received the video the night before it went viral. First up was Darian. A third student said that after receiving the email, she received a call from Darian and her teacher, Shena Ravenel, asking her to check her email. Ravenel told police that he forwarded the email to the student's cell phone, “knowing that the message would spread rapidly across various social media outlets and throughout the school,” and also sent it to the media and the NAACP.
She did not say that she had received it from Darien until she was asked about his involvement. Mr. Ravenel has not been charged with a crime.
Then-Superintendent Miriam Rogers called the comments “disgusting” and “highly offensive and inappropriate statements regarding African American students, Pikesville High School staff, and Pikesville's Jewish community.”
Billy Burke, president of the Administrative and Supervisory Employees Council, the union representing Iswort, was the only official to suggest the audio was generated by AI.
Mr. Burke said he was disappointed in the public's assumption that Mr. Eiswart was guilty. At a January school board meeting, the principal said he needed police presence at his home because he and his family were being harassed and threatened. Burke said at the time that he was also receiving harassing emails.
Experts in audio and video counterfeit detection told The Banner in March that there was overwhelming evidence that the audio was generated by AI. They noted that the AI was characterized by flat tones, unusually clean background sounds, and a lack of consistent breathing or pause sounds. We also applied the audio to several different AI detection techniques, which consistently concluded it was fake, although we couldn't be 100% sure.
AI voice generation tools are now widely available online, and a one-minute recording of someone's voice can be fully simulated using an AI tool that costs $5 a month, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported in February.
There are few regulations to prevent AI imitations known as deepfakes, and few perpetrators are prosecuted.