High School Athletic Director in Baltimore County Allegedly Created Racist Deepfake Audio Impersonating Principal
January 15, 2024
Dazhon Darien, former athletic director at Pikesville High School in Baltimore, allegedly used AI to create a purported deepfake audio clip impersonating Principal Eric Eiswert, embedding racist and antisemitic remarks. According to reports, the clip was intended to discredit Eiswert and was widely circulated, with some accounts linking it to threats and his placement on administrative leave. On April 28, 2025, Darien was reportedly sentenced to four months in jail after pleading guilty to disturbing school operations.
- Alleged deployer
- dazhon-darien
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- pikesville-high-school-students-and-staff, pikesville-high-school, eric-eiswert, baltimore-county-public-schools-community
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/675
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.