Two 16-year-old boys in Lancaster County will each serve six months of probation and pay $12,000 in restitution after using artificial intelligence to create hundreds of nude images of female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School.
The boys, who manipulated images of the girls from Instagram and elsewhere to make them appear nude, were ordered Wednesday by Lancaster County President Judge Leonard G. Brown III to also perform 60 hours of community service, according to the state attorney general’s office. They are prohibited from having contact with the victims.
“Many victims and their families articulated in court today their feelings of anxiety, depression, and devastation related to this conduct,” Attorney General Dave Sunday said in a statement Wednesday. “This type of weaponization of technology is affecting the mental wellness of students across the Commonwealth and country.”
The juvenile court disposition comes as schools and law enforcement are increasingly grappling with how to respond to kids using AI to produce so-called deepfakes. Parents in the Radnor and Council Rock school districts have voiced frustration with how their schools handled recent incidents.
In Radnor — where parents earlier this month asked Gov. Josh Shapiro to create statewide standards for schools responding to deepfakes — a juvenile was charged in January with harassment after an investigation into alleged AI-generated sexualized images. In the Council Rock district, two juveniles were charged last year with unlawful dissemination of sexually explicit material by a minor.
Law enforcement officials have declined to comment on those cases, citing confidentiality of juvenile court proceedings.
In Lancaster County, however, recent court proceedings were open to the public, because the boys admitted to charges — 59 counts of sexual abuse of children — that would have been felonies in adult settings, according to the attorney general’s office, which prosecuted the case. Pennsylvania enacted a law in 2024 defining explicit AI-generated images of minors as child sexual abuse material.
“The legal system is catching up to technology,” Nadeem Bezar, a lawyer with Kline and Specter representing more than 10 of the victims, said Wednesday. “We’re not just seeing this as no big deal, or something a bunch of people created on the internet.”
The boys shared the images with each other on Discord, an online messaging platform, according to prosecutors. In November 2023, prosecutors said, one of the boys inadvertently shared an image with other students at the school.
That prompted a tip to Safe2Say, Pennsylvania’s anonymous tip line for school safety concerns, according to prosecutors. While Lancaster Country Day School was alerted to the tip, it didn’t contact police.
Prosecutors said that failure to report wasn’t criminal, but parents sued the school, alleging it enabled the abuse. The boys continued to create images until May 2024.
Bezar said the victims “have been working their entire educational career at doing something well … and now all of a sudden, because of the acts of these two boys and the failures of the school, these young women are all struggling in their own way.”
Legislation that passed the state Senate in November would require school staff and other mandated reporters to report AI-generated explicit images of minors as child abuse. It’s now pending in the House.