For the past year, the conversation around AI-generated explicit imagery has often centred on what teenage boys do to their female classmates - and that's horrifying enough. But recently, teachers have become the newest disturbing target. In many cases, they're being deepfaked by their own students, their professional headshots being fed into "nudification" software and results being blasted across anonymous group chats. Today, let's look at what happens when this already-awful technology is used to strip dignity from those working in one of our valued professions.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

The Verge reports that Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and 33 affiliated publishers filed a federal lawsuit against Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann, accusing the AI giant of "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The 48-page complaint alleges a "brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping and downloading" tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions to train Claude, and seeks up to US$150,000 per infringed work.

With all three major music publishers now litigating against Anthropic, the total damages exposure runs into the billions. Though this comes not long after its US$1.5 billion author settlement, Anthropic said it "disagrees with the publishers' claims" and will robustly defend itself.

Meanwhile, YouTube just switched up how affiliate links work - for Amazon, anyway. TechCrunch reports that eligible US creators can now tag Amazon products directly in their Shorts, long-form videos and livestreams, earning affiliate commissions without needing to paste Associate links in descriptions. YouTube's systems can also automatically review recent uploads and tag eligible Amazon products without the creator lifting a finger.

For Amazon, it puts its marketplace inside one of the world's most-watched video platforms. For creators, it turns every product mention into a potential revenue stream. For viewers, it means the thing the creator just held up on screen is now a tap away from purchase - almost literally at your fingertips.

And finally... "Lake America" (as coined by the US Govt). Engadget reports that Google Maps has updated its labels following Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America amid an escalating trade dispute with Canada.

US users now see "Lake America," Canadian users see "Lake Ontario," and everyone else sees both, which definitely won't get confusing.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford unveiled a "Lake Ontario, Now and Always" sign at the lake's shoreline, and New York Governor Hochul said New York state would not use the new name. Google cited its longstanding policy of reflecting official government naming sources - the same logic it used when it renamed the Gulf of Mexico "Gulf of America" last year. The "everyone is 12 now" theory lives another day.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We’ve seen the horrifying reports of teenage boys using easily accessible online software to generate non-consensual explicit images of their classmates, turning schoolyards into digital minefields of harassment and humiliation.

It’s a modern escalation of adolescent bullying, in the worst way possible.
A digital continuation of high school cruelty that requires better platform moderation and stricter smartphone policies within the classroom perimeter.

But alas, another terrifying development has come about in this AI shitstorm: and the targets are no longer just the children in the desks. The teachers are now the ones facing the onslaught.

An unprecedented epidemic of sexualized deepfakes is being weaponised by students directly against their own instructors. Young teens are taking standard, harmless headshots from staff directories, cropping images from school sports pages, or secretly filming a teacher standing at the whiteboard, and feeding that raw visual data into automated "nudification" applications.

And as we all know, within seconds, the software spits out a realistic sexually explicit image or video of the educator, which is then immediately blasted across anonymous student group chats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Snapchat. Fucking awful.

This targeted violence completely shatters the traditional power dynamics of institutional education. Historically, a teacher’s authority relied on a baseline of professional distance, respect, and institutional boundaries. By converting an educator's physical likeness into a disposable and sexualised piece of digital slop, students are pulling off an insane subversion of that structure. Because it strips their teachers of their basic human dignity, and transforms a professional authority figure into an object of casual, locker-room ridicule.

The psychological toll on the staffroom is devastating, driving veteran educators out of the profession entirely because they can no longer walk into a classroom without wondering how many faces in the front row have seen a synthetic, degraded version of their body on a screen.

To make matters worse, the institutional response to this crisis has been a masterclass in bureaucratic paralysis. School boards and administrative committees are utterly unequipped to police a cloud-based network of anonymous, self-deleting digital assets. They patch together vague cyber-bullying guidelines and order temporary device bans, completely failing to recognise that the problem isn't the smartphone but the absence of a moral baseline in our relationship with technology. We have raised a generation on an unfiltered diet of short-form video loops and frictionless automation, conditioning them to believe that other human beings are just raw material to be edited, manipulated, and content-hacked for a brief flash of peer validation.

Getting through this dark wilderness will require a re-centring of human dignity over technological convenience.

We have to stop treating the proliferation of deepfake software as an unavoidable, trendy byproduct of digital innovation. The platforms providing these tools are actively subsidising image-based sexual abuse, masking their extractive profits behind the shield of free expression. Our communities must refuse to normalise this fucked up digital vandalism.

Which means creating real repercussions to the creation of non-consensual explicit media, not as a high school prank, but as a severe, life-altering violation of human rights.

It is a reminder that if we continue to prioritise AI over the safety and respect of the people who teach our children, we are just building a digital colosseum where everyone is eventually forced to bleed for the amusement of the crowd.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from TikToker amygingerhart, who had a flirtatious conversation with a clone of herself and gave a stunned and awkward response:
"What's your favourite snack?"
"You in that outfit."
"... Mine is French fries."

Creators are lipsyncing with the video and sharing whatever situation had them failing to rise to the occasion.

Some of my favourite examples:

How you can jump on this trend:
Film yourself lipsyncing the first and third lines of the sound and add whatever situation had you completely missing the vibe as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.