But the recording wasn’t what it seemed, according to Baltimore County police. The school officials charged Thursday by investigators used artificial intelligence tools to fabricate audio to falsely portray principal Eric Eiswart as a bigot and anti-Semite.
The employee, Dazon Darien, 31, a former athletic director at Pikesville High School, was taken into custody Thursday at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport while en route to Houston.After detaining Darien for possessing a firearm, airport security discovered that a judge had just issued a warrant for his arrest. In the case of AI.
Darien declined to comment via text message Friday, referring questions to an attorney who was not immediately available. He was charged with disrupting school activities, retaliating against a witness, stalking and theft during a hearing Thursday and was released on $5,000 bail, according to court records.
Eiswart did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The case has garnered attention far beyond Baltimore County, with easy access allowing users to create believable clones of politicians, celebrities, and ordinary citizens using just seconds of real audio footage. New concerns about AI tools are emerging.
“Anyone can create these kinds of deepfakes, spread them online, and wreak havoc on people’s lives very quickly and easily,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He said the Baltimore County Police Department had been consulted about the matter. . “This certainly won’t be the last,” he said, referring to the Baltimore incident.
Richard Forno, deputy director of the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County Cybersecurity Center, said Darien’s arrest is another reminder that the public “should not accept what we see on the Internet at face value.” Ta. “It may not be reality. It’s getting harder and harder to believe your own eyes and ears. You need to think critically before retweeting.”
Investigators seeking to prosecute this type of cybercrime are often hampered by limited legal mechanisms, AI and legal experts say. Scott Shellenberger, the Baltimore County prosecutor who is prosecuting Darien, said the case “shows that we may need to pass new laws.”
“We were trying really hard to find something to charge him with more, but there weren’t enough specific statutes,” Shellenberger said in a phone interview. “This is a new field of AI, a new misuse of AI, and we will create new laws to deal with this situation, to prevent people from wanting to do this and to punish those who do it.” You’ll need to.”
This recording was spread on Instagram and caused a huge response. The user’s Jan. 17 post sparked calls for Eiswart’s ouster, outraged students and parents, put the school district in crisis, and garnered national attention.
Investigators said that after the recording was released, but before it was discovered to be fake, a commenter on Eiswart’s social media account said, “The world would be a better place if you were on the other side.” It is said that he wrote it down. In response to the recording, police stationed officers outside Eiswart’s home as a security measure, and school officials called in counselors to speak with students and staff.
Civil rights activist DeRay McKesson, a former student of Eiswart’s, was among those who initially called for the principal’s removal. “I am not at all surprised by his comments on this recording,” McKesson wrote on X, who has 932,000 followers, adding that Eiswart’s “teaching and administrator licenses should be permanently revoked.” he added.
After Darien’s arrest, McKesson wrote of X: And I was wrong because I thought the recording could be true. ”
Others said they did not believe the recordings were genuine from the beginning, including the vice principal to whom Ms. Eiswart is said to have made the remarks, telling investigators, “She did not listen to the conversation.” It was “nothing like what she observed from him.”
Billy Burke, executive director of the Council of Supervising Employees, the union representing principals and other public school administrators in Baltimore County, also expressed doubts about the authenticity of the recording shortly after its release. “I hope we can find a lesson in the harm this has caused,” Burke said in a statement after Darien’s arrest. “My hope is that we learn that people are innocent until proven guilty.”
After the recording was released, Eiswart issued a public statement denying Darien’s comments, including that he was trying to “in any way get the black a–” removed from the school. I’ll bring you something to grab onto. ” In the recording, Eiswart’s fake voice also complained, “Another Jew has complained.”
According to the indictment, before the recording was made public, Eiswart was involved in a dispute with Darien that centered on a $1,916 payment the athletic director granted to another school employee who was also his roommate. It is said that Mr. Eiswart claimed that Mr. Darien made the payments without proper authorization.
Police interviewed Eiswart while investigating the recording, and Eiswart told them he believed Darien had fabricated the recording, according to the police indictment. He also told investigators that he did not want to renew Darien’s contract because of his “frequent problems with his work performance.”
Investigators traced the origin of the recording and determined it was emailed to three school employees, including Darien, the day before it was posted on Instagram. One of the employees, whose identity is not disclosed in the indictment, told police he sent the recording to students “knowing that the message would spread rapidly across various social media sites and throughout the school.” The employee also told investigators he sent messages to news organizations and the NAACP.
During an interview with police, Darien denied having anything to do with the “existence and release of the recordings” and said he did not know the person who emailed the recordings, according to the indictment. However, after issuing a subpoena to Google, police were able to link the email account to Darien.
As part of the investigation, police asked a University of Colorado forensic analyst who worked with the FBI to listen to the recordings. According to the indictment, analysts concluded that “the recordings contained traces of AI-generated content, with post-hoc human editing and background noise added for realism.”
Farid, who identified himself as the second forensic expert identified in the indictment, reportedly told investigators that “recordings were manipulated and multiple recordings were spliced together.”
Investigators said they determined Darien had paid accounts for ChatGPT and the OpenAI tool that makes the image generation tool Dall-E. However, it is unclear what specific services were used to create the AI-generated voice clones.
The incident is one of several high-profile cases in the country where AI voice deepfakes have wreaked havoc. In January, Democratic political operatives impersonated President Biden in robocalls urging New Hampshire primary voters not to go to the polls. This was an act aimed at raising awareness of the problems in the media that led to the state investigation. New Hampshire Deputy Attorney General James Boffetti said the investigation is still ongoing and no criminal charges have yet been filed.
Legal experts said the arrest in Baltimore is interesting because there is little precedent for criminal cases involving AI-generated deepfakes. There is no federal deepfake law, and more than 30 state legislatures are pushing AI bills, but proposals to regulate deepfakes are largely limited to political advertising and non-consensual pornography.
Tamaryn Lindenberg, founder of the Lindenberg Law Group, said what’s remarkable about the Baltimore case is that the alleged culprits were colleagues, not a shadowy anonymous cyber network. “An abuser is not who you think he is,” she said. “This is a colleague, this is someone else at school.”
Farid said: Given the rise of accessible, high-quality voice cloning tools, this trend won’t stop anytime soon. “Now that commercial applications of voice cloning are available to everyone for little to no cost, I think we will see more incidents like this in the future,” he said.
Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.
