Baltimore County police arrested a gym teacher for allegedly imitating the voice of the Pikesville High School principal using AI.
The teacher was identified as Dazhon Darien who was also the former athletic director of a Baltimore County high school.
Baltimore Teacher Allegedly Distributed AI-Generated Racist Rant
The Baltimore Banner reported that a recording of the AI-generated voice circulated on social media in January. The audio featured the voice of Pikesville High School principal Eric Eiswert while making racist and antisemitic rants.
The principal was then suspended due to the incident. However, the police found that the recording had a "flat tone, unusually clean background sounds, and lack of consistent breathing sounds or pauses."
The police traced the source of the recording and found Darien, who was also mentioned in the audio file. It was reported that the teacher accessed school computers to explore OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services.
Dangers of Deepfake, AI-Generated Voices
Over the past years, AI-powered tools have grown rapidly. Generative AI has been improved to provide services to humans, however, some users tend to misuse the tools to harm other people.
The police investigation showed that Darien targeted Eiswert as the principal was pushing an investigation into a potential mishandling of school funds. The teacher was released after posting bail but will face charges of theft, disturbing the operations of the school, retaliation against a witness, and stalking.
A data from Clarity previously revealed that deepfakes increase by 900% year over year. The data was only based on election-related misinformation but deepfake has been a huge problem since the 2016 presidential campaign.
The U.S. lawmakers have yet to pass several bills like the No Fakes Act and the No AI Fraud Act to help mitigate the harmful and misuse of generative AI tools by tech companies.
