The deepfake problem in schools has moved beyond students targeting each other. Teachers are now dealing with sexually explicit AI-generated images of themselves, and the legal system doesn’t have good answers for them.

WIRED spoke with four educators who became targets of deepfake content created by students. Their experiences reveal a legal gap that’s leaving victims with almost no recourse. One thread connects all their stories: when they tried to find accountability, they hit walls at every turn.

The Legal Vacuum

Here’s the problem. Most states don’t have laws specifically addressing non-consensual deepfakes. The patchwork that does exist is recent and inconsistent. Some states have criminalized creating or distributing sexually explicit deepfakes without consent, but many haven’t. And even where laws exist, they often weren’t written with schools in mind.

The federal picture is equally messy. There’s no comprehensive federal statute for deepfake creation or distribution. Victims can potentially pursue civil claims for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, or right of publicity violations, but these are expensive, time-consuming paths that require proof of harm and, in many cases, identifying the creator.

That last part is crucial. When a student creates a deepfake, school administrators often can’t or won’t identify them to the victim. Privacy laws like FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) complicate disclosure. Schools worry about lawsuits from parents if they reveal which student made the content. So teachers are left knowing someone created explicit images of them, but not who.

When Students Are Minors

The cases get even more complicated when the creators are minors. Prosecutors are reluctant to charge juveniles, especially when the student might face sex offender registration for creating digital content. Defense attorneys argue that deepfakes are speech, protected by the First Amendment. Some courts might agree.

The teachers WIRED interviewed described school responses that ranged from ineffective to nonexistent. In some cases, administrators treated the incidents as minor disciplinary issues rather than serious violations. One teacher was told that because the image “wasn’t real,” it wasn’t as serious as if someone had distributed an actual intimate photo.

That distinction doesn’t hold up well legally. Several states that have passed deepfake laws explicitly reject it. California’s AB 602, which took effect in 2024, makes it clear that digitally altered intimate images carry the same weight as real ones. But not every jurisdiction has caught up.

The Copyright Angle

Some legal scholars have proposed using copyright law as a workaround. If a teacher owns the copyright to their image (which gets complicated), they might have standing to sue for unauthorized use. But this is a stretch, and it doesn’t address the real harm, which isn’t about intellectual property. It’s about dignity, harassment, and the hostile work environment these images create.

Title VII and Title IX could provide routes for teachers to hold schools accountable if the deepfakes create a sexually hostile educational or work environment. But these claims require showing the school knew about the harassment and failed to respond adequately. And “adequately” is a slippery standard when the law hasn’t defined what schools are supposed to do about AI-generated content.

What Actually Happens Next

A few things are moving. Congress has considered federal deepfake legislation multiple times, but nothing comprehensive has passed. The Take It Down Act, introduced in 2024, would create a federal civil cause of action for victims of non-consensual intimate imagery, including deepfakes. It’s stalled, like most bills that try to regulate online content.

State legislatures are more active. In the past two years, at least 15 states have passed some form of deepfake-specific law. But the statutes vary wildly in scope, penalties, and what they actually prohibit. Some only criminalize sexual deepfakes. Others include political deepfakes or fraud. Teachers in states without these laws are out of luck unless they can make existing harassment or defamation statutes fit.

Schools, meanwhile, are writing policies on the fly. Some districts have added deepfakes to their acceptable use policies or student codes of conduct. But policy isn’t law. A student expelled for creating a deepfake might challenge the discipline in court, and it’s not clear schools would win without explicit statutory backing.

The teachers WIRED interviewed don’t have clean endings to their stories. Some got apologies. Others got nothing. The images, in most cases, are still out there. Once something is created and shared digitally, it’s almost impossible to fully erase.

What’s clear is that the law has not kept pace with the technology. Teachers (and students, and anyone else targeted by deepfakes) are navigating a system that wasn’t built for this. Until legislatures catch up, victims are left trying to fit a new kind of harm into old legal categories that don’t quite work.