Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with allegedly using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors.
Dazhon Darien was charged with disrupting school activities, after investigators determined they’d faked his voice and circulated the audio on social media in January, according to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office.** **Darien’s nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clips he allegedly faked.
Eiswert’s voice, which police and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments toward Black students and the surrounding Jewish community, was widely circulated on social media.
I suspect the people doing these things don’t sit down ahead of time and think “Hm, if I get caught I could go to jail for four years instead of two… I’d accept two, but four is too much.” Generally speaking the exact severity of the punishment isn’t really all that relevant. It’s how likely the person is to be caught at all that gives criminals pause.
I think the best thing to do would be to highly publicize situations like this where attempts to frame people fail. Make people who were thinking of doing something like this aware that they can be caught, and they’ll hopefully rethink themselves. And ideally it’ll be useful for the victims too, to be able to point to these cases when they tell people they didn’t really say those horrible things.