A court in south-west Spain has sentenced 15 schoolchildren to a year’s probation for creating and spreading AI-generated images of their female peers in a case that prompted a debate on the harmful and abusive uses of deepfake technology.
Police began investigating the matter last year after parents in the Extremaduran town of Almendralejo reported that faked naked pictures of their daughters were being circulated on WhatsApp groups.
The mother of one of the victims said the dissemination of the pictures on WhatsApp had been going on since July.
“Many girls were completely terrified and had tremendous anxiety attacks because they were suffering this in silence,” she told Reuters at the time. “They felt bad and were afraid to tell and be blamed for it.”
On Tuesday, a youth court in the city of Badajoz said it had convicted the minors of 20 counts of creating child abuse images and 20 counts of offences against their victims’ moral integrity.
Each of the defendants was handed a year’s probation and ordered to attend classes on gender and equality awareness, and on the “responsible use of technology”.
“The sentence notes that it has been proved that the minors used artificial intelligence applications to obtain manipulated images of [other minors] by taking girls’ original faces from their social media profiles and superimposing those images on the bodies of naked female bodies,” the court said in a statement. “The manipulated photos were then shared on two WhatsApp groups.”
Police identified several teenagers aged between 13 and 15 as being responsible for generating and sharing the images.
Under Spanish law minors under 14 cannot be charged but their cases are sent to child protection services, which can force them to take part in rehabilitation courses.
In an interview with the Guardian five months ago, the mother of one of the victims recalled her shock and disbelief when her daughter showed her one of the images.
“It’s a shock when you see it,” said the woman from Almendralejo. “The image is completely realistic … If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, I would have thought that image was real.”
The Malvaluna Association, which acted on behalf of the affected families, said the case had implications for wider Spanish society.
“Beyond this particular trial, these facts should make us reflect on the need to educate people about equality between men and women,” the association told the online newspaper ElDiario.es.
It said the case underlined the necessity of proper sex education at school so that children did not learn about sex from pornography, which “generates more sexism and violence”.
