No charges against Windsor Park students over AI pics

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This article was published 15/02/2024 (654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

No criminal charges will be laid against local teenagers accused of sharing nude photos of underage peers that were created with artificial intelligence.

City police have confirmed that, after discussions with the Crown prosecutor, an investigation into AI-generated explicit images of students from a Windsor Park high school is over.

“Charges aren’t being laid. Everybody is aware, and I will just say this won’t be the last we’re going to see of this type of incident,” said Const. Dani McKinnon, a spokesperson for the Winnipeg Police Service.

The police service’s internet child exploitation unit began investigating photos of underage students circulating at Collège Béliveau two months ago.

Victims came forward to report deepfakes — hyper-realistic images or recordings that have been altered via digital platform — to staff members at the Grade 7-12 school on Dec. 11.

The Louis Riel School Division has indicated the images appear to have been taken from publicly accessible social media and then “explicitly altered.”

McKinnon said police concluded AI was a factor in this case.

While declining to provide other specifics, she said evidence-related issues are among the considerations that lead to the Crown pressing or forgoing charges.

“It doesn’t surprise me because there really aren’t a lot of laws that are specifically directed towards this idea of the distribution of non-consensual intimate images,” said Katie Szilagyi, an assistant professor who studies AI, privacy and the law at the University of Manitoba.

Manitobans are eligible for provincial support and can sue for damages in civil court if their private and sexual photos are distributed without their consent.

The Intimate Image Protection Act was enacted in 2016 to protect victims and equip them with resources to remove private recordings from public platforms.

Szilagyi noted an absence of any reference to “synthetic media” in the document.

“That might be a place to start,” she said, adding B.C. and New Brunswick have taken steps to include altered images in their related laws.

Civil cases could be the way to seek remedies during the lag period, the academic said.

The Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties has been tapped to deliver in-class presentations on digital citizenship and misinformation at Collège Béliveau.

Executive director Sandra Krahn said schools are grappling with the real-time rollout of AI programs that have limited, if any, moral and ethical codes written into them.

“It’s open season – there’s not a lot of regulations, and that’s something we’ve been seeing for the last few decades; technology is advancing way faster than our society has the ability to develop safe mechanisms (for use),” Krahn said.

Teachers need resources to navigate discussions about safe internet use, the former educator said.

Szilagyi echoed those sentiments; the assistant professor said there is a need for increased public education to promote the critical analysis of images.

“We’re still in the early days of public awareness of the abilities of AI. We see that even with generative AI and the amount of trust that people are willing to put into communication in ChatGPT, for example,” she said.

In a new memo to community members, superintendent Christian Michalik acknowledged and applauded “the compassion and resilience of the Collège Béliveau community as they continue this journey of healing.”

Michalik had appealed to parents to talk to their children about “responsible communication,” on social media platforms including Snapchat.

The altered images in question were uploaded to Cybertip’s Project Arachnid, an online tool that detects child sexual abuse material and sends removal notices internationally.

As of this month, upwards of 165 billion images have been processed through the program since it launched in 2017.

Division administration would not provide details about the disciplinary penalties issued to students involved in the matter.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca