Former HS Athletic Director Arrested Over AI-Altered Deepfake of Colleague Having Racist Conversation

A high school athletic director in Maryland was arrested Thursday morning in connection with the creation of a deepfake audio recording of his school's principal having a fake, racist conversation. 

Dazhon Darien, 31, athletic director at Pikesville High School, was charged by police with disrupting school activities after Baltimore County Police said he created a falsified audio recording using artificial intelligence of principal Eric Eiswert in January. 

According to The Baltimore Sun, the audio clip, which uses Eiswert's actual voice, went viral and was condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school was inundated with calls of outrage and required increased police presence and additional counselors. 

Police arrested Darien as he was boarding a plane for Houston. Darien's bag was flagged for the way he packaged a gun his checked luggage. He also had an active arrest warrant.

Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said he was not sure whether Darien was attempting to flee or if he had legitimate travel plans. 

Darien is also charged with theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking. He was released on a $5,000 bond from the Baltimore County Detention Center.

Scott Shellenberger, Baltimore County’s state’s attorney, told The Baltimore Sun this is the first time his office has prosecuted a case related to AI, and one of the first his office could find in the country.

“In this particular case, we obviously had some statutes that were right on point, but we do in fact need to take a look at some others,” Shellenberger said at a Thursday news conference. “[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 activities carries a sentence of only six months.

The recording in question 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, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Eiswert remains an employee of Pikesville High School, but he will not return to the school this year. 

Police said Darien created the recording in retaliation for Eiswert investigating him for allegedly misusing school funds and theft. 

In the recording, a man’s voice sounds as if 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 employees received the email with the recording, including Darien and to physical education teachers, on Jan. 16, about a half hour before the clip went viral on social media. 

In an interview with detectives, Darien denied involvement in the recording or its release. He said 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.

The recovery cellphone number associated with the Google account was registered to Darien, police wrote. 

Investigators, with the help of digital forensics experts, determined that the recording was manipulated with multiple recordings placed together. 

In the wake of the recording, teachers feared that recording devices were planted in the school, which created a rift in trust between teachers and administrators, according to police.

“As a society, we need to get in front of and get a handle on AI because of, unfortunately, situations like this are going to continue to happen,” said Cindy Sexton, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County. “Our students are tech-savvy; lots of people are. It opens up a whole new world of concern for all of us. We all have our voices out there.”

Gabriella Waters, an artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher told CBS News that AI-created audio and video is something that people should "definitely be aware of." 

Waters, the director of Morgan State University's Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab, says producing convincing AI-generated voice clones takes just minutes and is just a few clicks away.

"It's pretty simple," Waters said. "These tools are designed to make it easy. You don't need to have a programming background anymore in order to interact with these systems or this tech."