Athletic Director Accused Of Using AI To Fake A Principal’s Racist Rant
A high school athletic director in Baltimore has been accused of using AI to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments, authorities said on Thursday.
The principal was placed on leave and had police outside his home after he received hate-filled messages and death threats over the fake recoridng.
What Happened?
Dazhon Darien, a 31-year-old high school athletic director in Maryland, reportedly created the AI audio recording to retaliate against Pikesville High School’s principal Eric Eisworth.
Eisworth was investigating Darien over allegations that he had mishandled school funds. Darien had allegedly paid his roommate about $1,900 in school funds under the pretence of coaching the girls’ soccer team.
In the forged audio, the principal appeared to make that “ungrateful” Black students “couldn’t test their way out of a paper bag” and had also disparaged Jewish people.
The audio clip then spread on social media, causing “profound repercussions,” Fortune reports. The recording resulted in the principal being placed on leave put his family at risk, causing police officers to provide security at his house.
The recording also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and an inundation of phone calls to the school.
AI Impersonation
After the principal, Eiswert, insisted he did not make the remarks, investigators found Dairen that the audio recording was originally shared from Darien’s address.
Baltimore County detectives asked experts to analyze the recording made by Darien and found that it contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing.
Detectives claim Darien used large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI and Bingchats to create the recording which also had added background noises for realism.
According to court documents, a second opinion from a professor at the University of California-Berkeley told police that “multiple recordings were spliced together.”
Scott Shellenburger, the Baltimore County state’s attorney, said the case appears to be one of the first nationwide involving AI that his office was able to find.
He said Maryland’s Legislature may need to update state laws to catch up with the possibilities of the new tech.
“We also need to take a broader look at how this technology can be used and abused to harm other people,” he said, per ABC News.
Darien now faces charges that include theft, disrupting school activities, stalking and retaliating against a witness.
