Teenagers are using AI-fueled ‘smear pages’ to mock their teachers

The video opens With the headmaster lip syncing a love song, but he’s not the only performer.

He’s joined on the song by AI-generated versions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — a splice between Will Joseph Cook’s “Bearound Me” and Beth McCarthy’s rewrite of the song on TikTok — with Epstein uttering the words, “Oh my God, did he invite her baby, maybe?”

The clip, which was posted to the Instagram account @thewyliefiles, has been liked more than 107,000 times. The caption reads like an overview of a large language model for the Wylie Independent School District in Collin County, Texas, where the singing supervisor previously worked, boasting of “strong academics” and “wide range of extracurricular programs.” One of the top comments says: “Gem alarm!” Suggesting that passers-by have struck gold in their daily scroll.

The skit is just one example of a new AI video trend on Instagram and TikTok created by students to mock school faculty and sometimes attack their reputations, apparently in order to go viral. These largely student-run accounts have earned the nickname “smear pages” online. It’s a digital twist on a standard high school prank, but potentially with much higher stakes.

“Defamation Page” posts use slang terms sourced from unsavory parts of the Internet. The language of “Looksmaxxing”, which comes from manosphere forums that teach men how to become more attractive, is commonly used in these memes, including words like “mog”, which means controlling another man with his appearance, and “sub5”, which was coined to refer to subhuman ugly people.

Some “defamatory” videos use the Viggle AI image-to-video tool, which gives creators the ability to insert any person depicted in any reference video, as well as animate a still image in a lip-sync video format. Viggle AI was described as “a new frontier in creating spontaneous extremist propaganda” by the Global Extremism and Technology Network, the academic research arm of King’s College London, in a recent blog post. The platform has more than 40 million users as of February. Viggle AI did not respond to a request for comment.

In one since-removed “slanderous” video using Viggle AI that was posted on TikTok, a teacher’s face was superimposed on someone shivering in the bathroom. The overlaid caption of the text reads, “Take your breath or be useless,” describing the seizure as a fentanyl high.

The posters behind these pages also use mutant extremist symbols. In one example, some teachers were let into the fantasy world of Agartha, a key setting in neo-Nazi cults where everyone is white and blond. Faculty members in the adaptation were depicted with glowing white eyes to indicate that they were allowed into Agartha or were given red eyes to show that they were rejected.

In the case of Crandall High School in Crandall, Texas, the situation has become even more dire. Memes posted by a viral TikTok account called @crandall.kirkinator broke containment from Crandall’s local user base, inspiring TikTokers with hundreds of thousands of followers — and no apparent ties to the school — to amplify a “slur” against Crandall teachers. The viral skit videos even enacted scenarios in which administrators reprimanded students who made such posts.

Officials at Crandall High School declined to comment on the situation, but at the end of January, all content on the @crandall.kirkinator TikTok account was deleted and replaced with a statement acknowledging the deletion of the concurrent Instagram account. “My Instagram account was not blocked, it was voluntarily deleted… Some teachers were harassed, spammed or emailed by random people, which was never our intention… The account was created as a joke and was not intended to escalate to this extent,” the statement read. Days after publishing the statement, the account began posting again on TikTok. Last week, it was completely deleted.