Editorial: As AI turns classmates into targets, schools and parents are playing catch-up

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Apr 16, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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Every parent should be paying attention to what’s been going on at Lake Zurich High School.

In an April 2 communication to families, school officials said police are investigating allegations that students used artificial intelligence to generate and share explicit, pornographic images using the likeness of other students.

District officials have said that no staff members directly viewed the images, underscoring both the sensitivity of the material and the limits schools face once a police investigation begins. The conduct itself dates to late February, but only came to light April 2.

Kids have been bullying each other since the dawn of human existence. These allegations are different. Imagine being a victim’s mother or father and having to console them, to strategize how to show their face back at school, to process the feelings of violation, embarrassment and sadness that inevitably follow such exposure. Imagine being the parent of the child who did it and will have to face the consequences.

What’s going on is an uncomfortable tension between two difficult truths. Victims of AI manipulation are suffering real harm, including humiliation and lasting emotional damage. At the same time, many of the teens responsible are not fully equipped to grasp the permanence and scale of what they’re doing.

Adolescent minds today have easy access to technology that can create and distribute images instantly, without clear or consistently enforced guardrails. Schools, laws and parents are still operating under rules built for a world where harmful images had to be shot, not fabricated, and where the consequences unfolded more slowly.

Last month, two teenage Pennsylvania boys received probation after generating hundreds of fake nude photos of classmates using AI. The boys were 14 at the time of the crime. Last year, police in Louisiana discovered several middle-school boys had been sharing AI-generated nude photographs of female classmates on Snapchat. Advocates say there are thousands of instances of AI targeting each year, and as the technology improves the problem grows with it.

A key challenge in attacking the problem is the nature of teenagers; their decision-making and maturity are still developing. In the same way we don’t expect kids to drink until they’re 21 or drive until they’re 16, we cannot expect all teenagers to make responsible decisions with tools this powerful.

The adolescent brain isn’t fully developed, resulting in a tendency toward risk-taking and lower inhibition. Couple that reality with a generation of teens who spend much of their social lives online, and it’s easy to understand how bullying has gone digital.

Teens can be more prone than adults to oversharing photos and information about themselves in text messages, emails and social media, which in turn increases their vulnerability to becoming victimized.

Kids today have an unfair responsibility placed on them to grow up faster when it comes to understanding how to conduct themselves digitally. The consequences are not just emotional, they have legal implications.

To their credit, state lawmakers recently updated Illinois’ child pornography laws to include AI-generated images.

In Illinois, it’s illegal to possess a photo of a naked child’s body or body parts, even if the images were sent willingly. Such media is considered child sexual abuse material. Each photo or video a person possesses counts as a separate individual violation carrying the potential for hefty fines and felony charges.

Notably, the law does not exempt minors from this statute. These laws were not written with adolescent misuse of AI in mind, and now we’re reckoning with uncomfortable questions about how far the justice system should go when the offender is also a minor. Should laws designed to punish adult exploitation be applicable to a generation of kids using tools they may not fully understand?

In Lake Zurich, school district leaders are urging parents to have “developmentally appropriate conversations” about digital behavior and to actively monitor their children’s online activity, a sign of how quickly expectations for parenting in the digital age are shifting.

Parents elsewhere should also assume this risk is no longer hypothetical. That means talking explicitly with kids about how the images they share can be manipulated, limiting what gets shared publicly and pushing schools to adopt clear policies on AI misuse before the next incident, not after it.

This is not a future problem — it’s already in our schools.

Treating it as just another form of bullying isn’t taking the situation seriously enough. Schools need clear rules, parents need to have uncomfortable conversations and lawmakers need to revisit how these cases are handled when the offender is a minor.

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