Back in April I wrote about what may be the first AI-powered hate hoax in the country. The principal of Pikesville High School, Eric Eiswert, was the target. In January of this year an audio clip began circulating in which Eiswert appeared to be making demanding comments about black children and Jews in his neighborhood.

In the recording, the person speaking refers to “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag.”

The speaker goes on to question how hard it is to get those students to meet grade-level expectations. He uses names of people who appear to be staff members and says they should not have been hired. The speaker sayshe should get rid of another person “one way or another.”

“And if I have to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side,” the voice in the recording stated.

Millions of people listed to the clip and at least one high-profile BLM influencer vouched for it.

Eric Eiswert was my social studies teacher and then the SGA Advisor at Catonsville High School and I am in no way surprised by his comments in this recording.

He should be fired immediately and his Maryland teaching and administrator licenses should be permanently revoked. https://t.co/NiVSd8GgiU

— deray (@deray) January 17, 2024

Eiswert was forced into hiding while the police investigated. He received threats and his reputation was ruined. The voice on the tape did sound a bit like Eiswert, but when a local reporter contacted him for comment, he denied having made the remarks and said he believed they were some kind of hoax or fake. 

Months later the police concluded their investigation having discovered the audio really was an AI-powered fake created by another teacher at the school.

Baltimore County Police arrested Pikesville High School’s former athletic director Thursday morning and charged him with using artificial intelligence to impersonate Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the public to believe Eiswert made racist and antisemitic comments behind closed doors...

Police say [Dazhon] Darien made the recording in retaliation after Eiswert initiated an investigation into improper payments he made to a school athletics coach who was also his roommate, and Darien is also charged with theft and retaliating against a witness.

Darien, the athletic director, knew Eiswert's investigation was going to get him fired so he created the audio clip to try to ruin Eiswert's reputation before that could happen. Darien is black and principal Eiswert is white. Once everyone was convinced Eiswert was a racist, the allegations against Darien would be seen as just more proof of his animus toward black people.

Today the BBC published a kind of follow up story about what happened at Pikesville High. Eiswert is now working at a different school. Even though the audio was proven to be a hoax, there are still people in the area who talk about it as if it were real. Read this carefully because I think it's the skeleton key for a lot our recent politics.

Months later, the effects of the fake audio clip are still felt in Pikesville. Mr Eiswert has moved jobs and is working in another school. And even though some community members told me they now accept the video is fake, the damage is done.

“This is a Jewish neighbourhood and to say something that's so inflammatory about the community was upsetting,” a woman called Sharon told me as she packed her grandchild’s pram into a car in a house opposite the high school last August.

For several minutes, Sharon talked to me as though the clip was real.

“I think when people say things like that, other people join in that and it makes me more fearful.”

When her husband chimed in from the car, reminding her the clip was actually fake, she admitted she did “find out later it was AI-generated”. But she said she was still angry about it.

I found that for people like Sharon, who had believed the clip was real, even for a short time, it stayed with them - especially when the message echoed genuine experiences of racism and discrimination. It reminded me of something I hear time and time again while investigating misinformation and conspiracy theories: “Well, even if it’s not real, it’s what I think they think.”

They are still angry about it even though they now know it was fake.

There's a whole lot of the BLM mythos which was built up around these same kind of stories. I don't just mean Jussie Smollet, I mean many aspects of the Trayvon Martin case, the Michael Brown case, the Sandra Bland case, the Jacob Blake case, the Kyle Rittenhouse case, the case of a climate activist shot by police in Georgia, and so on. It's hard to overestimate the number of provable falsehoods that circled the globe and that people are still angry about today, despite them having been debunked. Hand up. Don't shoot.

But this applies to other things as well. How many people (besides Joe Biden) are certain Trump said Charlottesville racists were "fine people?" How many people still believe elements of the Steele dossier or just the general idea that Trump was compromised by Russia. I suspect the number is still in the millions and it includes people who should know better. Some of them do know better but they're still angry about the claims even though they turned out to be fake.

It's a bit depressing to think about but what's even worse is that this hoax at a high school is probably just the first of many. Soon it's going to be so easy to produce this stuff that there will almost certainly be a lot more of it.