I read a 404 Media story back in May and I still think about it.
At Radnor High School in Pennsylvania, a freshman boy paid $250 for an app and used it to make fake nude pictures of five girls in his class. Real faces. Girls he sat next to every day. He sent messages about it from a school laptop. The next morning he stayed home. The girls came in anyway. So did his friends, who said they didn't see anything.
One of the girls texted her mom about it. Her words: "It's not okay."
She's a teenager, and she had to explain that to her own mom, because nobody else was.
The story is two months old. In tech news, that's ancient, and everybody moved on. But the apps are still up, and the next kid can still find one. Old news doesn't mean solved.
She's right. It is not okay.
If you haven't run into the term, a deepfake is a picture or video that AI made to look real. Feed an app a photo of somebody's face, and it builds a fake body or a fake scene around it. None of it happened. It just looks like it did. The ones built for this are called nudify apps, and they need exactly one clear photo. A school picture works fine. Most of these sites ask if you're 18 and then take your word for it.
And this isn't one strange kid at one school. Teachers have a name for it now. The NEA calls it a trend in school cyberbullying. Here's the number that stopped me: reports of AI-made child abuse images to the national tipline went from 4,700 in all of 2023 to 440,000 in the first six months of 2025. Radnor is just the one that got written about.
I got bullied in high school. I won't get into it. But I know what it's like to walk into a building where everyone already decided who you are, and you can't do anything about it. Back then it was words. Rumors, notes, jokes to my face. Bad enough, but it faded. People got bored. Somebody new next month.
Photo shaming isn't new either. Back in my day somebody printed a picture and passed it around the hallway. That was bad, but it was paper. There were only so many copies, and you could rip one up. Then it went digital and nothing gets torn up anymore. A fake picture doesn't get bored. It gets saved, sent, posted again, and it sits on somebody's hard drive for the rest of her life. Now it's AI, and a kid can make something that never happened and put it in front of the whole school before lunch. What I dealt with was nothing close to this.
What bugs me most is how easy it was. He didn't hack anything. He didn't need any skill. He opened an app store, paid, uploaded photos of his classmates, got abuse material back. That's a product. Somebody built it, listed it, took his money, kept a cut. Pennsylvania made this a crime back in 2024 and it still only took a credit card.
I write about AI here a lot, mostly because I like it. I use it every day. But this part I can't wave off. The same tools I like did this to five girls. "It's just tech, people misuse everything" is a lazy answer. A nudify app has one job. Nobody points it at a kid by accident.
I hope the companies do something. Not a statement. Not a policy page nobody reads. I mean the app stores that carry these apps, the payment companies that take the money, the AI companies that build the models. A ninth grader found this app, paid with a card, and aimed it at his classmates. Any one of them could have stopped it before it got to him. Build tools that can't do this, or pull the ones that already do. That's not a big ask.
Then there are the adults. Parents told 404 Media that the school handled it badly, and that it took the governor stepping in before anyone treated it seriously. Louisiana was worse. Two boys were charged for making images of their classmates, but before that happened, one of the girls they targeted got expelled for fighting the boy she accused. She got punished first. Schools were slow with the old kind of bullying too, but this one has a legal name, and the name isn't bullying. It's child sexual abuse material.
If you have a teenager, have the talk. Not "be careful what you post." Their photos are already out there and always will be. Have it with the boys. Making it is a crime. Having it is a crime. Standing there pretending you didn't see it makes you part of it. If you want help starting, Homeland Security has a tip sheet on AI and deepfakes written for parents and teens.
Those five girls showed up the next day. That's more guts than anybody in that building earned.