AINEWS
Four educators describe how the images spread on TikTok, what their schools did and didn't do, and what police could actually do about it.
On March 12, Luis DeSantiago was working his morning shift at a coffee shop in Los Banos, California when a text came in from a fellow barista. Her cousin had seen a TikTok post. DeSantiago should look at it, the message said.
The post used a slightly misspelled version of his name and his real face, pulled from a mirror selfie he had taken in college. In the original photo, he was standing in his work clothes. In the TikTok image, his clothes had been replaced with lingerie and his pose altered to be suggestive. A second account had reposted the same image with a profile picture pulled from his actual social media.
DeSantiago is a substitute teacher at a local middle school. The students who made the image go to his school.
He flagged the post to TikTok. He told the assistant principal. He called the parents of the students he suspected. He filed a report with the Los Banos Police Department. Months later, the image is still circulating and the accounts are still up, he said. No one has told him what, if anything, will happen next.
DeSantiago is not alone. WIRED spoke with three other educators who describe the same pattern: students using accessible AI image-generation tools to create sexually explicit synthetic images of their own teachers, then sharing them on platforms with little friction. The teachers work in different schools. The mechanism is nearly identical each time. The institutional response is the part that breaks.
The tools themselves are not new, but their accessibility is. By the time a student in middle school can type a short prompt and get back a convincing, photorealistic image of a specific teacher, the old categories stop working. Schools have protocols for cyberbullying. They have protocols for sharing real intimate images. They do not have a clear protocol for the situation DeSantiago and the other teachers describe, they said. Most districts have not yet written one for this specific case.
The platforms face the same gap. The teachers in this story are real people. The accounts impersonating them are traceable, with real names and stolen profile photos. DeSantiago's image is still up months after he flagged it. The other teachers describe a similar gap between reporting the content and seeing it taken down.
When DeSantiago filed his report, he said the responding officer acknowledged the gap: existing laws against non-consensual intimate imagery were written for real photos, and the case did not fit a clear local path. He left the station with a case number and no timeline. The other three teachers describe similar dead ends.
What that gap costs is what DeSantiago keeps turning over. He had been a substitute for years. He chose the work because he liked being in the room. After March, he found himself reconsidering how he stood near students, what he posted about his own life online, how he introduced himself to a new class. The image followed him across two schools. Parents he did not know saw it. The students who made it remained in the building.
His standing concern is the one he cannot verify. If students were willing to generate and post such an image publicly, he said, the harder question is what they are doing with the same tools privately, in group chats he will never see.