They Dedicated Their Lives to Teaching. Then the Deepfakes Started

For Luis DeSantiago, a substitute teacher in Los Banos, California, it started with a few text messages. On March 12, as he was working his other part-time job at a coffee shop, his phone lit up. A fellow barista said there was an AI photo circulating on social media. Her cousin wanted to know if it was DeSantiago.

At first, DeSantiago wasn’t worried—he figured that inappropriate photos violated TikTok’s community guidelines and were usually quickly removed.

“When I finally saw the image, that’s when it felt like a punch to the gut,” DeSantiago tells WIRED. Parts of it resembled a mirror selfie that he remembered taking at a job in college. But instead of his work uniform, he was wearing lingerie. And instead of standing normally, as he had been in the original photo, he was posing suggestively.

The texts kicked off a monthslong saga that crossed two schools and involved students and administrators. And DeSantiago is far from the only educator who’s been victimized this way.

WIRED spoke with three other teachers who allege that their students made sexualized photos and videos of them, likely using AI. They say the incidents have been profoundly distressing and disappointing—and in some cases, it’s led them to reassess how they view their work and their relationships with their students.

After he received the texts, DeSantiago began to piece together who might have been behind the image. One account that shared it used their real name in their TikTok profile—it was a student DeSantiago knew from the local middle school, where he regularly filled in. DeSantiago suspected the involvement of two other students based on people who followed and interacted with that account, and his knowledge of student friend groups. He was scheduled to work at that very middle school the next day.

DeSantiago reported the incident to the assistant principal, who assured him that the school would "take care of it.” Later that evening, he decided to look for the image by searching his name on TikTok. He discovered that a different student had created an account impersonating him—it used his name, slightly mispelled, and had the same photo as their profile picture.

Over the next few weeks, DeSantiago says, he went back and forth with school administrators, the parents of the students, and even the 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,” DeSantiago wrote to the principal. “Keep in mind this could include other students as well.”