When the demand for racism far exceeds the supply, why not use AI technology to manufacture some for creating a national furor:
Pikesville High athletic director used AI to fake racist recording of principal, police say, Baltimore Sun, April 25, 2024
Baltimore County Police arrested a high school athletic director Thursday morning in connection with an AI-made audio clip of Pikesville High School’s principal having a fake, racist conversation.
Dazhon Darien, 31, is charged with disrupting school activities after police say he created the falsified audio recording of Eric Eiswert in January. The audio clip using Eiswert’s voice went viral and was swiftly condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school was inundated with outraged calls and needed an increased police presence and additional counselors.
Darien is also charged with theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The recording included offensive statements made about Black teachers, Black students’ test scores and Jewish parents. Eiswert was removed from the school and required a police presence at his house due to online threats. He maintained his innocence through a union spokesperson.
Baltimore County Police wrote in a 17-page charging document that Eiswert initially believed Darien, Pikesville High’s athletic director, created the fake recording because of a grievance over his contract not being renewed. Darien also fired a long-term coach without approval, Eiswert told police.
In the recording, a man’s voice sounds like he’s talking to someone named Kathy, whom many listeners interpreted to be Vice Principal Kathy Albert. She told police she never had the conversation in the clip.
The man’s voice in the recording says he has to “put up” with “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” and Black teachers who “should have never been hired.” The recording continues with the man saying he’s “sick of the inadequacies of these people” and if he “has to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side.”
Three Pikesville High employees — Darien and two physical education teachers who police said were friends with him — received an email from an unfamiliar email address with the MP3 recording around 10 p.m. Jan. 16, about a half hour before the clip went viral on social media.
One of the P.E. teachers was mentioned in the recording as someone who shouldn’t have been hired. She told detectives she was having professional issues with Eiswert and was not renewing her contract to work at Pikesville High. When she received the email with the audio clip, she sent it to a student and emailed it to several media outlets, she told police. The student then “rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” police wrote.
Darien denied involvement in the recording or its release in an interview with detectives. He them he was unfamiliar with the email that sent the recording to him. Over two months, detectives subpoenaed documents from Google, AT&T and T-Mobile that led to an internet provider address registered to Darien’s grandmother, police wrote in charging documents.
As the great Twitter user Frank DeScushin put it:
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Using AI to create fake racism may be new, but using fake racism allegations to destroy someone’s life is getting old. The media treats a white person wrongly blaming a black person as hideous racism, but a black person wrongly framing a white person gets little media attention.
So here we are at the final frontier of racial hate hoaxes: AI deep fakes, ensuring black people can accuse white people of making racial statements that the former created themselves.
