Schools in the US are installing vape-detection tech in bathrooms to thwart student nicotine and cannabis use. A new investigation reveals the impact of using spying to solve a problem. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice. The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. The first drag from a friend's vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape. She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn't turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine. "I would ask my friends who had them, 'I'm going through a lot, can I use it?'" Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. "Or'I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.'"

When news broke that AI-generated nude pictures of students were popping up at a Beverly Hills Middle School in February, many district officials and parents were horrified. But others said no one should have been blindsided by the spread of AI-powered "undressing" programs. "The only thing shocking about this story," one Carlsbad parent said his 14-year-old told him, "is that people are shocked." Now, a newly released report by Thorn, a tech company that works to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, shows how common deepfake abuse has become. The proliferation coincides with the wide availability of cheap "undressing" apps and other easy-to-use, AI-powered programs to create deepfake nudes.

A middle school in Beverly Hills, California, is investigating the circulation of nude photos of students generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Staff at Beverly Vista Middle School were alerted last week to the dissemination of images that superimposed the faces of some of its students using AI. "We want to make it unequivocally clear that this behavior is unacceptable and does not reflect the values of our school community," the district said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. "Although we are aware of similar situations occurring all over the nation, we must act now. This behavior rises to a level that requires the entire community to work in partnership to ensure it stops immediately."

AI image generators have been responsible for so much in the last few months. Barely a day goes by without us discovering some new experiment, whether it's resurrecting late celebs or creating a tool so we can turn anyone into a Pokémon. Now someone's used them to enhance what 30 years ago was the cutting edge in video game graphics. An artist has fed the characters of Sega's nineties fighting game Virtua Fighter through an AI image generator, turning the original 3D polygon graphics into photorealistic images (well, almost). To see how this technology works, take a look at our piece on how to use DALL-E 2 (opens in new tab).

It's 1:50 p.m., just five minutes before the fourth period is set to start at Tanashi Daini Junior High in western Tokyo. From one of its classrooms reverberates the sound of frustrated teachers, who surround and stare anxiously at a large screen set up to replace a green chalkboard that, under normal circumstances, would be commanding the attention of students in the room. At the center of the scene is Megumi Kurihara, a veteran Japanese-language teacher who is supposed to begin her class in just a few minutes. But this isn't like any class she has ever taught in her decadeslong career. It's going to be fully remote, with only that big screen and a tablet connecting her to about 70 students logging in from home.

You've got a classroom filled with middle school students working out math problems on computers. Which students are knocking them out with ease? In a pilot test of math software at David E. Williams (DEW) Middle School in Coraopolis, Pa., emojis tell the smart-glasses-wearing teacher what she needs to know. A smiling emoji hovers over a student's head: That means the student is progressing nicely. A frown emoji indicates struggle.

On the windy afternoon of March 17, 2017, I opened my mailbox and saw a white envelope from the San Francisco Unified School District. The envelope contained a letter assigning my younger daughter to a middle school. This letter was a big deal; San Francisco's public schools range from excellent to among the worst in the state, and kids are assigned to them through a lottery. The last time we put her name into the lottery, for kindergarten, she was assigned to one of the lowest-performing schools in California. Then we got a break: A private school offered a big discount on tuition.

Soon, the glow of hundreds of screens illuminates each face in every classroom. Inside Skye Templeton's seventh-grade Social Studies class, students are enthralled by online documents and videos about the casualties of World War II. Nearby, in Sara Sharpe's sixth-grade math class, a small group of students works through computer drills covering ratios and percents. And, across the hallway, English and Language Arts teacher Lori Meyer expresses amazement at how much her eighth graders enjoyed doing their final project: a research paper and iMovie on the 1960s. With their MacBooks, students researched topics, wrote their papers, and submitted to their teacher via email. "This is the first time in my 12 years of teaching that students said writing the research paper was their favorite assignment," Meyer said, "and I know it was due to the laptops."