The athletic director at Pikesville High School in Maryland was arrested Thursday morning in reference to a man-made intelligence case Audio clip of the principal having a fake, racist conversation.
Dazhon Darien, 31, is charged with disrupting school operations after Baltimore County police said he made the fake audio recording of Eric Eiswert in January. The audio clip with the director's voice went viral and was quickly condemned from the Baltimore County community. The school was inundated with indignant calls and needed an increased police presence and extra counselors.
Maryland Transportation Authority police arrested Darien as he boarded a plane from BWI Marshall Airport to Houston. Police officers noticed Darien's bag because he had packed a gun in his checked luggage and discovered he had an lively arrest warrant.
Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said police plan to serve the warrant on Thursday. He didn't know if Darien desired to escape or had travel plans.
Darien can be charged with theft, retaliation against a witness and stalking. He was released from the Baltimore County Detention Center on $5,000 bail. He didn’t list an attorney in online court records and didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Baltimore County District Attorney Scott Shellenberger said that is the primary time his office has prosecuted a case involving AI and one in every of the primary his office has present in the country. State lawmakers might want to update criminal laws in the subsequent legislative session to incorporate the brand new technology, he said.
“In this particular case, we obviously had some laws that were on point, but we actually need to look at some others,” Shellenberger said at a news conference Thursday. “[We] “We also need to take a broader look at how this technology can be used and abused to harm other people.” He added that the charge of disrupting school operations carries a sentence of just six months.
Eiswert stays employed by Baltimore County Public Schools but won’t return to Pikesville High this school 12 months, Superintendent Myriam Rogers said on the news conference. She was joined by Shellenberger, McCullough, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. and other county officials.
Baltimore County police wrote in a 17-page charging document that Darien created the fake recording in retaliation for Eiswert's investigation of him for alleged misuse of faculty funds and theft. Eiswert also believed that Darien had complained that his contract had not been renewed and that Eiswert had reprimanded him for firing a long-time coach without authorization, he told police.
In the recording, a person's voice sounds as if he’s talking to someone named Kathy, who many listeners thought was Assistant Principal Kathy Albert. She told police she never had the conversation within the clip.
The man's voice within the recording says he has to place up with “ungrateful black kids who can't get out of a paper bag” and black teachers who “should never have been hired.” The recording continues with the person saying he’s “sick of these people's inadequacies” and if he “has to receive one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I will join the other side.”
Three Pikesville High employees – Darien and two gym teachers who police said were his friends – received an email from an unknown email address containing the MP3 recording around 10 p.m. on Jan. 16, roughly half an hour before the clip went viral on social media, police wrote.
In the recording, one in every of the physical education teachers was named as someone who mustn’t have been hired. When she received the e-mail with the audio clip, she sent it to a student and emailed it to several media outlets, she told police. The student then “quickly spread the message across various social media outlets and throughout the school,” police wrote.
The teacher told investigators that she was having skilled problems with Eiswert and wouldn’t be renewing her employment contract at Pikesville High. The Baltimore County School Board received the resignations of Darien and the 2 Pikesville High teachers last week.
In an interview with investigators, Darien denied having any involvement within the recording or its publication. He said he didn't know which email sent him the recording. Over two months, investigators 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.
The recovery mobile phone number related to the Google account was registered to Darien, police wrote. The number has since been deactivated. Detectives also consulted an FBI contractor and a forensic analyst, who said the recording contained “traces of AI-generated content with post-human editing,” reminiscent of background noise for realism.
A BCPS information technology staff member searched Darien's access to the system's network and located him using voice tools and accessing OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services much like OpenAI on three occasions – on December 18th, December nineteenth and December fifteenth . January, the last time This was the day before the audio clip was released.
A second report from a forensic analyst said the recording had been tampered with because several recordings had been stitched together, police wrote.
Rogers said the varsity system has submitted a suggestion to terminate Darien. School officials are investigating the 2 physical education teachers, who’re on leave. McCullough said the criminal investigation is ongoing.
The theft allegation, which Rogers said is ongoing, involves Darien allegedly paying his roommate, a junior varsity coach, $1,910 to work as an assistant coach on the women' soccer team, which the roommate didn’t do.
According to police, teachers feared that recording devices had been installed in the varsity, resulting in a breach of trust between teachers and principals.
Cindy Sexton, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, which represents athletic directors, said the union is waiting for the criminal investigation to start. TABCO and the National Education Association are concerned that AI is being manipulated and used against educators, she said.
“As a society, we need to deal with AI and get a handle on it because, unfortunately, situations like this will continue to happen,” Sexton said. “Our students are tech-savvy; Many people are. It opens up a whole new world of worries for all of us. We all have our voices out there.”
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