Art by Clark MillerWelcome to Fakesville: Inside an AI Nightmare That Tore Apart a School
Our monthslong reporting into racist audio that went viral at Pikesville High shows the enormous damage a digital fake can wrought—and how easy it is to make one. Even more unsettling: Similar events could happen anywhere, and they almost certainly will.
On January 17, @murder_ink_bmore, a Baltimore-based Instagram account with 240,000 followers, posted what it said was a voice recording of Eric Eiswert, principal of Pikesville High School outside Baltimore, denigrating Black students and faculty as well as Jews.
“I seriously don’t understand why I have to constantly put up with these dumbasses here every day,” said the voice that sounded like Eiswert. The speaker went on, singling out three Black Pikesville High employees as low performing, including one named DJ. The speaker promised to “drag his Black ass out of here one way or another!”
Nestled in rolling green suburbs, Pikesville High has around 900 students—most of them Black in a town that is mainly white. Fifty-three-year-old Eiswert, a former social studies teacher who is white, joined as principal in 2021. The school, which belongs to the Baltimore County Public Schools district, boasts a $40 million renovated math center and a high 95% graduation rate. Still, while 80% of Pikesville’s white students were proficient in 10th grade English last year, that figure was 40% for Black students. The recording seemed to capture Eiswert venting his frustration with the situation in startlingly racial terms, and it went viral in a matter of hours, spreading from Instagram to TikTok and X.