Middle Schooler Made AI Nudes of Classmates. Kentucky Charged Him

Intro — What Happened While I Was Recording

Welcome to The Tech Radar for Parents. I'm your host, Weston, brought to you by Nicholas D. West Tech LLC. This is your briefing for the week of September twenty first, twenty twenty six.

Last week I recorded this show on a Thursday. That same Thursday, about six hundred miles away, a police department in Henderson, Kentucky took a report that nude photographs of middle school students were being made with artificial intelligence and passed around the school. I didn't know. Nobody did. It became public the following Monday, and by then a kid was in a juvenile detention center facing four charges.

That's the ugly this week, and I'm going to walk you through exactly what happened, exactly what the district said, and the two things you can do this weekend, one of which takes about ten minutes.

The good this week is real, and it landed on Tuesday. Discord, the app where an enormous number of middle and high schoolers actually live, started sorting every single account it has into age groups. Teenagers got new protections turned on by default, whether they asked for them or not. Your kid may already be in a different bucket than they were a week ago, and most of them will never see a prompt about it.

The bad is a second school district in three weeks losing the system that holds your child's grades and attendance. This time it's Spokane, Washington. Schools stayed open. The computers did not.

And there is a fourth story I can't leave out, because I think it's the most important thing that happened this week even though it happened in another country. On Monday, a government sued OpenAI over a school shooting. Not a family. A government. The attorney general of British Columbia says ChatGPT flagged the shooter's conversations eight months before the attack, reviewed them internally, and never told the police.

Then a decoder ring, and this week I finally have one. For eight straight weeks I've come to this segment empty handed and told you so. This week the dictionary did my job for me.

One note before we start. This episode talks about sexual images of children, and it talks about a school shooting and a suicide. If you or your child are struggling, call or text nine eight eight. Free, confidential, twenty four hours.

Let's go.

The Good — Discord Picked an Age for Your Kid

Let's start with the good, and the good this week is that one of the biggest platforms your kid uses stopped asking politely.

On Tuesday, September twenty second, Discord announced that it is rolling out age assurance globally, and that it began automatically sorting every existing account into one of three groups. Adult, eighteen and up. Teen, thirteen to seventeen. And a third group called unconfirmed, for accounts where there isn't enough information to guess.

Here's the part I want you to hear clearly, because it's unusual. Discord is not waiting for your kid to tell it how old they are. It's deciding. It looks at the communities, servers and games the account is connected to, how active the account is, and how old the account is. Quoting Discord, no single server determines your age group, and we don't look at your messages, calls, or other content to decide which age group you're in. So it is reading the shape of the account, not the contents of the conversations. I think that distinction matters, and I want to give them credit for it.

If the account lands in the teen group, four things change by default. Messages from people who aren't friends get routed into a message requests inbox instead of straight to your kid. Sensitive images get blurred or blocked. Age restricted servers, channels and bot commands become inaccessible. And the full profile, including what game your kid is playing right now, is visible only to friends and to people in smaller shared servers.

Those are defaults. Nobody has to opt in. That is the thing advocates have been asking platforms to do for about a decade.

Now, Discord says, quoting, more than ninety percent of you won't be asked to confirm your age. Which means for nine out of ten families, this happened silently this week, and the first you'll hear of it is right now.

So what if the guess is wrong? What if it decided your fifteen year old is an adult, or decided you are a teenager? You can correct it, and you do not have to hand over a driver's license to do it. The options include sharing the age range your Apple App Store or Google Play account already has, a credit card check run through Stripe, a video selfie that Discord says is processed on your own device, a passport through Google Wallet in a handful of countries, a full I D scan, or a reusable credential called AgeKey. The app store option is the one most parents will find easiest, and it doesn't involve photographing your face or your documents.

Two pieces of honesty about this. First, Discord isn't doing this purely out of goodwill, and it says so. Quoting, age assurance laws are expanding around the world. It already had to launch age assurance in Brazil and in Texas. This is a company getting in front of the law on its own terms rather than waiting to be told how.

Second, this is inference. It is a machine guessing your child's age from which games they play and who they hang around with. It will be right most of the time, and when it's wrong it will be wrong in both directions. A thirteen year old on an old account that plays grown up games can get read as an adult.

The rollout is staggered. Discord said, quoting, we're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to reach your account. By the time you hear this, it should have reached you. That's your first action item, and I'll come back to it.

The Bad — Spokane Went Dark

Now the bad, and if this sounds familiar, that's the point.

On Sunday evening, September twentieth, Spokane Public Schools in Washington State was notified of a network security threat. On Monday morning the district told families, quoting the email, out of an abundance of caution, we have chosen to take several of our systems offline.

The systems they took down were PowerSchool, which holds grades, attendance and parent teacher messaging, and BusinessPlus, which runs payroll. Spokane is the second largest district in Washington, about thirty thousand students across fifty eight schools.

Here's what they did differently from Springfield. They kept the schools open. Teachers took attendance by hand. Superintendent Adam Swinyard said, quoting, we did school for a very long time without technology, and so our staff are prepared to do that. District spokesperson Ryan Lancaster on why those two systems specifically went dark, quoting, we took them offline because they are our most important pieces.

As of Thursday, four days in, the systems were still down with no restoration timeline, and outside technicians were still investigating. Grades and attendance are not visible to parents or students. Lancaster said I T personnel are working around the clock.

Now the careful part, and I want to be more careful here than some of the coverage.

On the question every parent actually cares about, whose information was taken, the district's answer is, quoting, preliminary findings indicate only staff were affected by the incident. Those affected have been notified. Swinyard said it is too early to speculate on the extent of information affected, or who is responsible.

I want to underline the word preliminary, because I think it is the most likely sentence in this episode to change after you hear it. Early scope findings in these incidents get revised, and they usually get revised in one direction.

What the district has not said is ransomware. No official has used that word, no official has named a group, and no ransom demand has been confirmed. I did look at the leak site trackers. There is an entry the same day for an education victim in the United States whose name is masked out, attributed to a group called Nightspire, with no data and no ransom amount listed. I am not going to tell you that entry is Spokane, because I can't. The name is redacted, there's no domain attached, no outlet has reported it, and the district has named no one. That is a lead, not a fact, and the difference is the whole job.

One more thing I want to head off. PowerSchool was in the news about eighteen months ago for a very large national breach of its own systems. This is not that. PowerSchool has said its hosted product and other customers' data were not affected here. PowerSchool went dark in Spokane because Spokane pulled the plug on it, not because the vendor was broken.

So that's two districts in three weeks. Springfield, Massachusetts lost a week of school and had student data confirmed stolen. Spokane kept school open and says, preliminarily, only staff were touched. In both districts the first public numbers cover staff, and in Spokane the students' exposure is still formally undetermined.

The Ugly — Henderson, Kentucky

Now the ugly. Henderson, Kentucky.

On Thursday, September seventeenth, the Henderson Police Department received a report that nude photographs of middle school students were being generated with artificial intelligence, and shown to other students. The school is South Middle School.

During the investigation, officers identified A I generated photographs of two minor victims on a digital device. A juvenile was detained and lodged at a juvenile detention center on four counts. Distribution of sexually explicit images without consent. Two counts of possession or viewing of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor. And distribution of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor.

The district's full public statement, quoting. We are aware of a situation at South Middle School involving a student allegedly misusing artificial intelligence and inappropriate images. Henderson Police Department is involved and is investigating the situation. The district says it has been in contact with the families involved and is cooperating with police. No individual official is named anywhere in this story, and I'd note that's a choice districts make deliberately when minors are involved on both sides.

This became public on Monday, September twenty first. The report was filed the Thursday before, which is the same day I sat down and recorded last week's episode. I want to say that plainly, because it's the second week in a row I've had to tell you that something was already happening while I was telling you what was happening.

Let me be precise about what this is and what it isn't. This is not the Cat in the Hat trend. There's no threat here, no lockdown, no viral character, no TikTok. Nobody was trying to scare a school. This is a kid who used a tool to manufacture sexual images of two other kids, and then showed them around. Those are different problems with different fixes, and I don't want to blur them together just because both of them have the letters A I in the sentence.

And here's the thing I keep coming back to. Four criminal charges. A detention center. A middle schooler. The tool was free, it was on a phone, and the victims were two children he presumably sees in a hallway every day. There was no hacker here. There was no stranger. The entire incident is a twelve or thirteen year old, an app, and a very short afternoon.

If your reaction is that the charges sound heavy for a middle schooler, I understand that, and I'd ask you to sit with both halves of it. Kentucky charged a child with possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material, because that is what the statute says those images are, no matter who generated them or how. Two other children now have images of themselves that exist in the world. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the hard conversation in your house this week is that your kid can become the first one without ever thinking of themselves as a criminal.

One more, quickly, and I'm keeping it short this week because it deserves a full segment later.

On Monday, a government sued OpenAI over a school shooting. The attorney general of British Columbia, Niki Sharma, filing with a local school district, is suing OpenAI and naming Sam Altman personally. The shooting was in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia in February. Eight people died. Six were children.

The allegation that stopped me is this. Sharma says the shooter's ChatGPT account came to OpenAI's attention in June of twenty twenty five, about eight months before the attack, because the conversations kept returning to gun violence. She says it triggered an internal review at the company, and that review was never passed to the police. She also confirmed she has not read those conversations herself, and says OpenAI has refused to hand them over. So that is a government's allegation, not a proven fact, and it will be tested in court.

I'm following this one, because the question underneath it is the question. When a chatbot notices a kid talking about hurting people, who does it owe a phone call to? Right now the honest answer is nobody in particular.

The Decoder Ring — Newly Official, Not New

Now the Decoder Ring. And I want to start by keeping a promise I've been making badly for two months.

For eight weeks in a row I've come to this segment and told you the same thing. That I went looking for genuinely new teen slang, and all I found were the same recycled listicles from the same parenting sites, repeating words from twenty twenty five. Eight weeks of that. This week I finally have something, and it came from the least cool source imaginable. Merriam-Webster.

Last week the dictionary added about fourteen hundred new words and definitions. And here's the honest framing, because I'm not going to oversell this. These are not new words. Your kid has been saying most of them for two years. What happened is that the dictionary finally admitted they exist. So this isn't five words your teenager invented last Tuesday. This is five words your teenager has been using in front of you, that are now officially English.

One more piece of honesty. The dictionary's website blocks the kind of automated lookup I use, so for four of these five I could not pull Merriam-Webster's exact wording. The definitions I'm about to give you are mine, in plain language. They're accurate. They're just not verbatim, and I'd rather tell you that than pretend.

Number one. Looksmaxxing. Roughly, maximizing your physical attractiveness, treating your own face and body as a project to be optimized. This is the one on the list I actually want you to pay attention to. It starts in a genuinely harmless place, skincare, haircuts, going to the gym. And there is a pipeline from that harmless place into some very dark corners of the internet, where boys are told their bone structure has already decided their entire future. If you hear this word in your house, it's worth a conversation about where they're reading about it.

Number two. Crashout. Roughly, to lose control emotionally, to melt down, to self destruct. He's about to crash out. She crashed out in third period. It's used lightly and constantly. Occasionally it is not being used lightly, and that's worth listening for.

Number three. Copium. A blend of coping and opium. Roughly, the comfort someone takes in a story that isn't true after they've lost. It's a joke word, usually aimed at sports fans and fandoms.

Number four. Parasocial. This one is actually in the dictionary's own announcement, and it's the most useful word on this list for a parent. It describes a one sided relationship, where your kid knows everything about a creator, a streamer or a celebrity, and that person does not know your kid exists. It feels like friendship from one side only. It is worth naming out loud in your house, because a kid who has a word for it can notice it happening.

Number five. Cuffing season. Here's one I can give you verbatim, quoting Merriam-Webster. A time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with. It's October through about February. It's mostly a joke. It also explains a certain amount of middle school drama that shows up right about now.

Also on the dictionary's list, and I'll mention these quickly. Glow up. Rickroll. Promposal. Meme coin. Vibe coding. Uncanny valley, which is that creepy feeling from something artificial that looks almost, but not quite, human. And an acronym starting with F that the dictionary now recognizes and that I am not going to spell out on a show for parents. If your kid says it, they know what it means, and so do you.

Your Weekly Action Plan (1–2)

Here is your action plan for the week. Four things, and the first one is new this week and takes about two minutes.

Number one. Find out which age group Discord put your kid in.

If your child uses Discord, the app sorted them into adult, teen, or unconfirmed sometime in the last few days, without asking. Sit down with them, open the app, and look at the account settings together. If your thirteen, fourteen or fifteen year old got read as an adult, the teen protections are off, and that's the one you want to fix. Fix it with the app store age range option, or the on device selfie. You do not need to upload a driver's license or a passport to correct this, and I would not.

And make this the conversation, not the audit. The useful question is not did you lie about your age. The useful question is, did anything change in your apps this week, and did you notice.

Number two. Freeze your child's credit. I said this last week about Springfield. This week Spokane makes it twice in three weeks, so I'm saying it again, and I'm going to say the part most parents don't know.

A credit freeze is not credit monitoring. Monitoring tells you after somebody has opened a line of credit in your eight year old's name. A freeze stops them from opening it at all. Under federal law you can freeze a minor child's credit file at all three bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, for free. It takes about ten minutes per bureau the first time, and you will need to mail or upload proof that you're the parent.

Here's why this matters more for children than it does for you. A child's credit file is usually empty, and nobody checks it for eighteen years. That's exactly what makes it valuable. When a district's student records walk out the door with addresses, dates of birth and in some cases Social Security numbers, that's the raw material. Springfield offered credit monitoring to its staff. Nobody has offered the students a freeze, because no district can. Only a parent can do it.

Your Weekly Action Plan (3–4)

Number three. Have the A I images conversation this week. Not next month. This week.

And I want you to have it twice, because there are two different children in the Henderson story.

The first version is for the kid who might make one, or might be standing next to the kid who makes one. Say this plainly. Making a sexual image of a real classmate, even if you generated it, even if it's obviously fake, even if it started as a joke, is a crime in most of this country, and children do get charged. And if it shows up on your phone and you forward it, you are now in the chain. The rule in our house is delete it, do not forward it, and tell an adult. That last part breaks the cycle, and it is the only part that does.

The second version is for the kid it happens to, and it's shorter. If someone ever makes an image like that of you, it is not your fault, you are not in trouble, and there is something we can actually do. Tell me and we'll handle it. Parents, the thing you can do is called Take It Down. It's a free service from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that helps get these images pulled off participating platforms, and it works for A I generated images too. Know it exists before you need it.

Number four. Ask your school what its phone policy actually does, and then lower your expectations about what it can fix on its own.

A study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology followed students at one secondary school through a full academic year after a total smartphone ban. Nine hundred sixty students, eight surveys across the year. The researchers measured no clear improvement in social wellbeing. No short term change in loneliness, in support from friends, or in being a victim of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying that kids committed did drop slightly. Over the year, loneliness actually rose modestly.

Now the caveats, and they're big ones. This is one school, in Belgium, with no comparison school, and the authors are careful to say within the specific conditions of this school. Other research points the other way. So do not walk away from this thinking phone bans don't work. That is not what it says, and I would be lying to you if I put it that way.

What it says is narrower and more useful. Taking the phones away, by itself, did not make these kids less lonely. The authors' own conclusion is that restrictions probably need to be paired with things that actively build connection and digital literacy. So the question for your principal isn't just do we have a ban. It's what did we put in the space where the phones used to be.

Closing & Outro

Let's bring it home.

The good. Discord started sorting every account it has by age, and turned on real protections for teenagers by default, without waiting to be asked. The bad. Spokane, Washington became the second district in three weeks to lose the system holding your child's grades, and four days in it was still down. The ugly. A middle schooler in Henderson, Kentucky is facing four criminal charges for making A I nude images of two classmates and showing them around. And the story I'll be following, a government in Canada is suing OpenAI, saying ChatGPT flagged a shooter's conversations eight months early and told no police.

Now the part of this show I will not skip, which is what I did not check.

The Cat in the Hat threat trend, the one that produced more than ten juvenile arrests earlier this month, got no research pass at all this week. Not a single search. So I cannot tell you whether it is growing, dying, or turning into something else. I'm not going to dress that up as nothing happened. I didn't look.

I checked two company newsrooms this week, Meta and Discord. I did not check TikTok, Snap, YouTube, Roblox, OpenAI or Character A I. If any of them shipped a teen safety change this week, I'd have missed it, and given what Discord just did, I'd bet something is moving at the others.

On Springfield, Massachusetts, I could not finish the sweep. What I can tell you is that as of Friday the eighteenth, the local public radio panel discussing it still had not named a ransomware group, and there was still no word about credit monitoring being extended from staff to students. What I cannot tell you is whether that changed later in the week, because I didn't get through every outlet. That's we could not find, not there was nothing.

And on Meta and New Mexico, the nine hundred forty two million dollar judgment we've been tracking. I checked the New Mexico Department of Justice press releases on Thursday. Nothing. No ruling on Meta's motions, no hearing date, no bond order, no appeal. There is a jury out in Santa Fe against Meta right now, and I want to be clear that it is a different case, about Cambridge Analytica and adult data privacy. It is not our child safety case. Ours is still sitting on a judge's desk.

If you or your child are struggling, call or text nine eight eight. Free, confidential, twenty four hours.

If this episode was useful to you, the best thing you can do is like and subscribe. And if you've got another thirty seconds, please leave a review. Reviews are free. They cost you nothing but the thirty seconds, and they are genuinely the thing that lets us keep making this show and keep it free for parents. Share it with another parent who needs it. Drop a comment with the topic you want covered next. New episodes weekly, so turn on notifications.

Two things before I let you go. Two minutes in Discord to see which bucket your kid landed in. And ten minutes per bureau to freeze their credit, which is still the highest value thing on this list and still the one almost nobody does.

I'm your host, Weston, with Nicholas D. West Tech LLC. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and I'll see you next week.