Luis DeSantiago found out he’d been turned into a deepfake while pouring coffee.
It was March 12. The substitute teacher from Los Banos, California was working his other part-time job at a coffee shop when his phone lit up. A fellow barista told him an AI photo of him was going around on social media. Her cousin wanted to know if it was really him.
DeSantiago wasn’t worried at first. Inappropriate photos violate TikTok’s community guidelines, he figured, and those usually come down fast.
Then he saw it.
“When I finally saw the image, that’s when it felt like a punch to the gut,” DeSantiago said. Parts of it looked like a mirror selfie he remembered taking at a job back in college. But he wasn’t in his work uniform anymore. He was in lingerie, posing suggestively, instead of standing the way he had in the real photo.
Those texts started a saga that stretched across months, two schools, students, administrators and the police.
Four teachers, the same story
DeSantiago isn’t an outlier. Three other educators described students allegedly making sexualized photos and videos of them, most likely with AI. They called the experience deeply distressing and disappointing. For some, it changed how they see their own work and how they relate to the kids in their classrooms.
DeSantiago did his own detective work. One account sharing the image used a real name in its TikTok profile, and it belonged to a student he knew from the local middle school where he regularly filled in. Based on who followed and interacted with that account, plus what he knew about student friend groups, he suspected two other students were involved.
He was scheduled to work at that same middle school the next day.
He reported it to the assistant principal, who told him the school would “take care of it.” That evening he searched his own name on TikTok and found something else: a different student had built an account impersonating him, using his name with a slight misspelling and the same photo as the profile picture.
The image kept spreading anyway
What followed, DeSantiago said, was weeks of back-and-forth with administrators, parents and police.
“If these students aren’t afraid of generating and posting these images of me, I am concerned of what they may be circulating privately through text messages and group chats,” he wrote to the principal. “Keep in mind this could include other students as well.”
One student admitted to creating the image and got in-school suspension. DeSantiago was later told the image had also been shared on Snapchat. It kept spreading. More students posted it. He started getting crude sexual comments on his own TikTok account.
He told administrators he didn’t want assignments at the middle school “until this matter is fully addressed.” The district didn’t respond to a request for comment.
So he took a substitute assignment at the local high school. The image followed him there. During one class, an AirDrop of the same AI-generated photo landed on his phone before being quickly revoked. He could tell it was making the rounds among the students in front of him.
The principal said the school was launching an “immediate investigation” and offered to meet with him or make the school counselor available. DeSantiago said he probably won’t return to the district this year. Right now, he said, he doesn’t feel safe doing it.
The law has teeth. Schools don’t have a playbook
Distributing fake nude images of nonconsenting adults can amount to cyberstalking and can violate the federal Take It Down Act, which makes it a crime to publish nonconsensual “intimate visual depictions of individuals, both authentic and computer-generated” online.
In most of these cases, though, the teachers never reported the content to the platforms where it appeared. Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy pointed to the company’s harassment and sexual content policies, which prohibit sharing AI-generated or manipulated content to humiliate or sexually harass others. Snap has “established processes” for reporting such content, she said, and the company continues to “develop features and tools designed to support the safety, privacy, and well-being of our community.” TikTok didn’t provide comment before publication.
Donna Ballman, a retired employment advocacy lawyer, said a student creating and sharing sexual images of a teacher is a “clear case” of sexual harassment in the workplace. Under federal antidiscrimination laws, employers have to provide a workplace free of sexual harassment. In a school, that might mean disciplining the student or moving them to another classroom.
But there’s “no blueprint” for how schools have to respond, Ballman said. Administrators aren’t even required to tell a victimized teacher how a student was disciplined.
“They just have to make [and] create a safe environment for the victim,” Ballman said.
A teacher in her mid-twenties is waiting for the next one
One middle school teacher, who requested anonymity because she didn’t have permission from her district to speak about her experience, said she’s seen so much AI-generated content used to harass teachers that she’s bracing for the next wave.
Last year, she said, students found public photos of a teacher in her sixties, manipulated them to make it look like she was committing sex acts and passed them around in a Snapchat group chat.
A few months ago a student told her about a TikTok account impersonating her. The tells were there: her face had that characteristic AI smoothness, her mouth moved unnaturally as she spoke, the voice didn’t sound like hers. Some videos showed her skydiving or doing backflips. Others showed her describing sexual acts she performed and enjoyed.
She told her principal, who said they’d “see what we can do.” Students kept warning her about the account all day. Some said they knew which classmate made it, a student known to have behavioral problems.
“I know a lot of the kids that reported it to me genuinely believed that was my account, and that I was saying those things,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, you guys, that is not me.'” She asked them to report it to TikTok, and the account came down quickly.
It didn’t stop at the fake account
Still rattled, she brought up the account at the next monthly teacher meeting. A colleague said he’d seen an apparently AI-generated fake video of himself getting arrested, which he thought came from the same student.
Over the following days and weeks, that student escalated to in-person harassment, “cursing me out, calling me names, telling me to fuck off, calling me a bitch.” She raised it again at the next faculty meeting. The assistant principal said the same student had been calling and texting them in the middle of the night, and posting apparent AI-generated photos of them to TikTok.
The principal pulled the student from her class and tried to limit his access to her. The harassment continued until the student left the district and TikTok removed the account.
She doesn’t think the problem lives in one kid. “It’s kind of unsurprising that we are dealing with that, because these kids just have a hard time,” she said. “I’m just worried about this happening again.”
What it costs a counselor to stop trusting
Alice, who asked to be identified by her first name, works at a UK college training students aged 16 to 19 in trades like construction. Her role mixes administrative work, including attendance, with college counseling. She meets individually with about 150 students a year and takes pride in being a sounding board, an adviser, a mentor.
This winter, administrators told her a student had filed a report about two videos circulating among his classmates. One appeared to be real footage of her talking with a student. The other looked like a manipulated version of the first. In that one, she wasn’t talking to anyone. She was taking her clothes off and dancing around in what was either underwear or a bikini.
As a qualified youth worker, Alice said, her job often means talking about things students feel “too embarrassed to tell their parents about,” like drugs, parties or having safe sex. She’d had several of those conversations with the student she suspected made the video. He denied it when administrators questioned him, and soon dropped out. The college didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“It makes me reflect as well on those conversations, thinking, did he think that he could overstep a line because we were having these discussions?” she said. “It makes you question everything.”
The college let her step away from the class for a few weeks and moved to educate students about the danger of creating or distributing deepfakes. When she came back, the room felt different.
“I did have a really good rapport with my students, I do have a good rapport with my students,” she said. She still loves the job. “But it’s definitely made me a bit more cautious, a bit more vigilant when it comes to folks.”
Three days of suspension, and a bigger worry
Luke Red, a sixth-grade teacher in Arizona, had a similar experience to DeSantiago’s. His students circulated an AI-generated photo of him in the comments of his public TikTok account, showing him kissing another male teacher.
Red reported the accounts to TikTok, not for content violations but for being under the minimum age of 13. TikTok didn’t remove them. His school launched an investigation immediately and identified the student quickly. The student admitted to creating and sharing the image and received a three-day suspension, the most severe punishment kids that age can get for a first-time sexual harassment offense under the district handbook. The district didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Thinking about it “has kind of sent me into a spiral,” Red said. Not because of what happened to him specifically. Because of the permissive, enthusiastic culture around AI among his students.
“It just got to the point where students felt comfortable enough creating inappropriate images,” Red said. “Obviously when you’re making your teachers do sexual things with these images, that’s where it crosses the line.”
He ends up feeling worse for the kids than for himself.
“It’s just clear [that] so many kids nowadays just don’t understand not only how what they’re doing can affect others, but just what happens on the internet and how dangerous it can be,” Red said.
