‘This was my innocence’: 15-year-old exposes AI’s horrifying threat to girls

As a freshman in high school, the last thing Elliston Berry expected was to see AI-generated nude deepfakes of herself floating around — but unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened.

"I woke up with messages from my friend notifying me that these images of me were going around,” Berry tells BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey on “Relatable.” “It was terrifying. We didn’t know what to do; I was embarrassed to tell my parents. It was really, really scary.”

“Thankfully, the photo was an Instagram photo. So everyone that has followed my Instagram knows the original picture, and obviously, my mom keeps up with all my social media, so she recognizes the original photo and she was like, ‘I know this isn’t real,’” Berry explains.

However, while Berry and her parents took action immediately, it didn’t undo the harm that all her classmates seeing the image caused her.

“This was my innocence. This was a nude photo of me, and I was a freshman, I was 14 years old, and everyone had seen this of me, and I was terrified,” she says.

Her mother was understandably equally disturbed.

“I’m at that point looking at her picture, and then the nude picture, and I’m going, ‘This is child pornography,’ and ‘what is happening here.’ You know, her high school’s over 2,400 students, so I’m like this is going around,” Berry’s mother says. "Just the magnitude of that.”

Her parents were quickly able to find the account that was distributing the photos, but they couldn’t determine who was behind the account.

“The account that was sending these photos was texting people from my school saying awful things,” Berry explains, “and kind of bullying us and tormenting us and just overall wanting to ruin us.”

“And he was sending these out to our entire school,” she continues. “It was terrible. No one knew what to do. People I wasn’t friends with were receiving these photos."

The student behind the account then started sending threatening messages that he was doing this because he wanted to “ruin” these girls and “go out with a bang.”

“So, then, in today’s world, I’m calling the school going, ‘This could be a threat to the entire population of our school. You need to do something about this,’” Berry’s mother explains.

Then the school had a lockdown drill on a Friday — which terrified Berry even more.

“The one good thing that happened out of it was that while they were on lockdown, this kid decided to go online to his account and on school Wi-Fi start posting pictures, more of the girls. So at that point, they were able to catch him,” Berry’s mother tells Stuckey.

“If he hadn’t done that, I don’t know that we would have ever caught him,” she adds.

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