Reported Use of AI Apps to Create Sexualized Deepfake Images of High School Students at Cascade High School in Iowa

March 25, 2025

A disturbing incident involving the use of AI apps to create and share sexualized deepfake images of students took place at Cascade High School in Dubuque County, Iowa. The Western Dubuque Community School District reported that classmates allegedly used such applications without consent, highlighting potential gaps in trustworthy AI governance.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.646, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.638, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.636, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unnamed-students-at-western-dubuque-community-school-district
Alleged developer: unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-image-generator-developers
Alleged harmed parties: unnamed-students-at-western-dubuque-community-school-district, minors, students, families-of-unnamed-students-at-western-dubuque-community-school-district, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1350

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.