The 42-second voice recording, purportedly of a Maryland high school principal in the midst of a racist rant, derided Black students as “ungrateful” and unable to “test their way out of a paper bag.” “I’m just so sick of the inadequacies of these people,” sneered the voice on the recording, which was posted on social media in January, prompting outrage and leading to the school district's placing the principal on leave. The recording was not what it seemed, according to Baltimore County police. A school employee, investigators charged last week, used artificial-intelligence tools to fabricate the audio with the intention of falsely depicting the principal, Eric Eiswert, as bigoted and antisemitic.
The employee, Dazhon Darien, 31, the former athletic director at Pikesville High School, was taken into custody at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport as he was about to fly to Houston. Airport security personnel, after detaining Darien because he was carrying a firearm, discovered that a judge had issued a warrant for his arrest in the AI case, the Washington Post reports. The case has drawn attention far beyond Baltimore County, raising fresh concerns about easily accessible AI tools that can allow users, with only a few seconds of real audio footage, to create believable clones of politicians, celebrities and ordinary citizens. “Anyone can create these types of deepfakes, spread them online and very quickly and effortlessly wreak havoc on a person’s life,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley who said Baltimore County police consulted him on the case. Darien’s arrest is another reminder that the public should not “accept what you see on the internet for face value,” said Richard Forno of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “It may not be real. It’s becoming harder to trust your eyes and ears. You have to think critically before you retweet.”