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The Band's Visit

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, eran kolirin, sasson gabay, ronit elkabetz, saleh bakri, imad jabarin, hisham khoury, photos & videos, technical specs.

A small Egyptian Police band arrives in Israel. They are supposed to play at an initiation ceremony but instead are left stranded at the airport. The band tries to make their way on their own, only to find themselves in a desolate, small Israeli town, somewhere in the heart of the desert. A lost band in a lost town.

Francois Kheel

Tarak kopty, eyad sheety, uri gavriel, ahuva keren, shlomi avraham, hila surjon fischer, rubi moscovich, khalifa natour, doron ashkenazi, orit azoulay, ehud bleiberg, sophie dulac, itai elohav, koby gal-raday, shai goldman, tami kushnir, arik lahav-leibovitz, eilon ratzkovsky, habib shehadeh hanna, yossi uzrad, michel zana.

The Band's Visit

Miscellaneous Notes

Winner of the Bridging the Border's Award at the 2008 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

Winner of the Jury Coup de Coeur Award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Released in United States 2007

Released in United States 2008

Released in United States December 7, 2007

Released in United States January 2008

Released in United States May 2007

Released in United States November 2007

Released in United States on Video July 29, 2008

Released in United States September 2007

Released in United States Winter February 8, 2008

Shown at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) May 16-27, 2007.

Shown at London Film Festival (Film on the Square) October 17-November 1, 2007.

Shown at Palm Springs International Film Festival January 3-14, 2008.

Shown at Santa Barbara International Film Festival (World Cinema) January 24-February 3, 2008.

Shown at Telluride Film Festival August 31-September 3, 2007.

Shown at Toronto International Film Festival (Contemporary World Cinema) September 6-15, 2007.

Shown at Vancouver International Film Festival (Cinema of Our Time) September 27-October 12, 2007.

Feature directorial debut for Eran Kolirin.

Sony Pictures Classics acquired domestic distribution rights at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival for a reported low-six figures.

Released in United States 2007 (Shown at London Film Festival (Film on the Square) October 17-November 1, 2007.)

Released in United States 2007 (Shown at Telluride Film Festival August 31-September 3, 2007.)

Released in United States 2007 (Shown at Vancouver International Film Festival (Cinema of Our Time) September 27-October 12, 2007.)

Released in United States 2008 (Shown at Santa Barbara International Film Festival (World Cinema) January 24-February 3, 2008.)

Released in United States January 2008 (Shown at Palm Springs International Film Festival January 3-14, 2008.)

Released in United States May 2007 (Shown at Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard) May 16-27, 2007.)

Released in United States September 2007 (Shown at Toronto International Film Festival (Contemporary World Cinema) September 6-15, 2007.)

Released in United States November 2007 (Shown at AFI/Los Angeles International Film Festival (World Cinema) November 1-11, 2007.)

Released in United States December 7, 2007 (one week Oscar qualifying run; New York City and Los Angeles)

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The Band's Visit

Cast & crew.

Sasson Gabai

Ronit Elkabetz

Saleh Bakri

Rubi Moskovitz

Khalifa Natour

• Average 7.9
• Reviews 119

Information

© 2007 Band's Visit Limited Partnership. All Rights Reserved.

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Rotten Tomatoes® Score

...ultimately cut from the same cloth, with similar feelings and thoughts, hopes and disappointments, experiencing the same loneliness, love and longing in life...

Even without the coveted Oscar pedigree, this modest comedy has to be the most delightful and enjoyable movie now playing in local theaters.

Everything in it is telegraphed to the point of exasperation. [Full review in Spanish]

Tenderly written, beautifully photographed, and patiently directed.

For all of its dry wit and visual gags, The Band's Visit is ultimately a poignant slice of life about people from totally different backgrounds and cultures forging unexpected connections and healing old wounds.

It's not going to solve any problems in the Middle East, and it doesn't attempt to, either. It's just a quiet story about the uncomfortable charm of coerced hospitality.

It's both quintessentially Israeli and an enjoyable experience that will touch audiences no matter what their background.

[Writer/director Eran] Kolirin finds bittersweet humor in the comedy of their melancholy lives and fumbling efforts at communication and common ground

Filmmaker Kolirin shows Israelis what they've been missing, and the rest of us what the Middle East could be, in the gentle, human-scale antics of the confused Egyptian band.

Additional Info

• Genre : Comedy, Drama
• Release Date : December 7, 2007
• Languages : English
• Captions : English
• Audio Format : 5.1

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The band's visit.

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This heartwarming and poignant winner of the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard prize is the mesmerizing and witty story of strangers in a strange land. A fading Egyptian police band arrives in Israel to play at the Arab Cultural Center. When they take the wrong bus, the band members find themselves in a desolate Israeli village. With no other option than to spend the night with the local townspeople, the two distinctly different cultures realize the universal bonds of love, music and life. Set against a breathtaking desert landscape, this cross-cultural comedy proves that getting lost is sometimes the best way to find yourself.

© 2007 The Band's Visit Limited Partnership. All Rights Reserved.

© 2024 Sony Pictures Digital Productions Inc.   All rights reserved

The Band's Visit

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• Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore Like no fish-out-of-water film in recent memory, it leaves you with the hope that these fish will find their way back to water, and maybe learn to share that puddle before the desert dries it up entirely.
• Boston Globe Ty Burr It's a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it's over.
• Chicago Tribune Jessica Reaves You can watch The Band's Visit for its political idealism, or you can watch it for entertainment value alone. In either case, it doesn't disappoint.
• Detroit News Tom Long You expect The Band's Visit to be a sweet little snapshot, a delightful and endearing culture-clash movie -- funny and poignant and human. And it is all those things. What's surprising is how it manages to be just a bit more.
• Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert A quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us.
• ReelViews James Berardinelli A drama about isolation and communication, The Band's Visit is characterized both by strongly delineated characters and low-key comedy.
• AV Club Noel Murray Tonally, The Band's Visit steps gingerly on the line between 'sweetly humane' and 'cloyingly quirky,' but [director] Kolirin pulls back the reins just enough, maintaining control by expressing as much with his framing as with his script.
• Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey Every frame of this low-key delight is about foreignness.
• Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum Something marvelous happens as the filmmaker, in his first feature, expertly metes out small scenes of communication between people taught, for generations, to be wary of one another: This Band swings with the rhythms of hope.
• Film.com Jonathan F. Richards The Band's Visit has pathos, but it is also very funny.
• Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect.
• Seattle Times Moira MacDonald [Director] Kolirin wonderfully maintains an atmosphere of both humor and melancholy.
• Washington Post Ann Hornaday With luck, filmgoers who discover this gem about an Egyptian police band stranded in a small Israeli town will make it the must-see movie of the season.
• Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern This modest little fable from Israel, in English, Hebrew and Arabic, has spellbinding resonances, yet never breaks the spell by blowing its own horn.
• Slate Dana Stevens At moments, the movie is almost sentimental, but the performances save it every time.
• New York Press Eric Kohn Pretty, resonant and utterly approachable as a gentle comedy, The Band's Visit is conventionally low key.
• New Yorker Anthony Lane When in doubt, strike up the band.
• New York Magazine/Vulture David Edelstein The Band's Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy.
• Observer Rex Reed The Band's Visit is a lovely first film from young Israeli director Eran Kolirin that offers a Middle Eastern inflection on the bittersweet stylings of Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki.
• Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer Writer-director Eran Kolirin has a gentle touch, although the film is too self-consciously sentimental.

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The eight men wear sky-blue uniforms with gold braid on the shoulders. They look like extras in an opera. They dismount from a bus in the middle of nowhere and stand uncertainly on the sidewalk. They are near a highway interchange, leading no doubt to where they’d rather be. Across the street is a small cafe. Regarding them are two bored layabouts and a sadly, darkly beautiful woman.

They are a band from Egypt, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. Their leader, a severe man with a perpetually dour expression, crosses the street and asks the woman for directions to the Arab Cultural Center. She looks at him as if he stepped off a flying saucer. “Here there is no Arab culture,” she says. “Also, no Israeli culture. Here there is no culture at all.”

They are in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. “ The Band ’s Visit” begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a comedy, and turns into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all.

The town they have arrived at is lacking in interest even for those who live there. It is seemingly without activity. The bandleader, named Tewfiq ( Sasson Gabai ), asks if there is a hotel. The woman, Dina ( Ronit Elkabetz ), is amused. No hotel.

They communicate in careful, correct English; she more fluent, he weighing every word. Tewfiq explains their dilemma.

They are to play a concert tomorrow at the opening of a new Arab cultural center in a place has that almost, but not quite, the same name as the place they are in.

Tewfiq starts out to lead a march down the highway in the correct direction. There is some dissent, especially from the tall young troublemaker Haled ( Saleh Bakri ). He complains that they have not eaten. After some awkward negotiations (they have little Israeli currency), the Egyptians are served soup and bread in Dina’s cafe. It is strange, how the static, barren, lifeless nature of the town seeps into the picture, even though the writer-director Eran Kolirin uses no establishing shots or any effort at all to show us anything beyond the cafe — and later, Dina’s apartment and an almost empty restaurant.

Dina offers to put up Tewfiq and Haled at her apartment, and tells the young layabouts (who seem permanently anchored to their chairs outside her cafe) that they must take the others home to their families. And then begins a long, quiet night of guarded revelations, shared isolation and tentative tenderness. Dina is tough but not invulnerable. Life has given her little that she hoped for. Tewfiq is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid. They go for a snack at the restaurant, its barren tables reaching away under bright lights, and Dina points out a man who comes in with his family. A sometime lover of hers, she tells Tewfiq. Even adultery seems weary here.

When the three end up back at Dina’s apartment, where she offers them wine, the evening settles down into resignation. It is clear that Dina feels tender toward Tewfiq, that she can see through his timid reserve to the good soul inside. But there is no movement. Later, when he makes a personal revelation, it is essentially an apology. The movie avoids what we might expect, a meeting of the minds, and gives us instead a sharing of quiet desperation.

As Dina and Twefiq, Ronit Elkabetz and Sasson Gabai bring great fondness and amusement to their characters. She is pushing middle age, he is being pushed by it. It is impossible for this night to lead to anything in their future lives. But it could lead to a night to remember.

Gabai plays the bandleader as so repressed or shy or wounded that he seems closed inside himself. As we watch Elkabetz putting on a new dress for the evening and inspecting herself in the mirror, we see not vanity but hope. Throughout the evening, we note her assertion, her confidence, her easily assumed air of independence. Yet when she gazes into the man’s eyes, she sighs with regret and mentions that as a girl she loved the Omar Sharif movies that played daily on Israeli TV, but play no more.

There are some amusing interludes. A band member plays the first few notes of a sonata he has not finished (after years). A bandmate calls him Schubert. A local man keeps solitary vigil by a pay phone, waiting for a call from the girl he loves. He has an insistent way of showing his impatience when another uses the phone.

In the morning, the band reassembles and leaves. “The Band’s Visit” has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Band's Visit (2008)

Rated PG-13 for brief strong language

Sasson Gabai as Tewfiq

Ronit Elkabetz as Dina

Saleh Bakri as Haled

Khalifa Natour as Simon

Mad Jabarin as Camal

Written and directed by

• Eran Kolirin

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The Band’s Visit: From Movie to Musical

The Band’s Visit has the rare honor of becoming a phenomenal success twice, first as a film and later as a musical. Both times, this beloved tale transcended its modest origins to capture the hearts and minds of audiences everywhere.  

Written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin in his directorial film debut, The Band’s Visit movie tells the story of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra who mistakenly travel to the wrong Israeli town. Intending to go to an Arab cultural center in Petah Tikva, the sixth largest city in Israel at the time, the Orchestra ends up on a bus to the fictional town of Bet Hatikva in southern Israel’s Negev Desert. Kolirin cast several famous actors in his film, including the Baghdad-born Israeli actor Sasson Gabai, the Israeli actress Ronit Elkabetz, and the Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri.  

Selected for the 2007 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard (“At a Glance”) category, which highlights films made by newer directors or ones with non-traditional stories and innovative filmmaking techniques, The Band’s Visit charmed audiences at the festival, winning a Special Jury Award ( Coup de cœur du jury ). Released in Israel later that year, the film would go on to win seven Ophir Awards from the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, including Best Film, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Screenplay and Music. Submitted by Israel for consideration in the Foreign Language Film category of the Oscars, the film was disqualified because the majority of the dialogue is spoken in English, not Hebrew or Arabic.  

Although the plot is wholly original, the film’s embrace of Egyptian cinema and Middle Eastern music was influenced by experiences from Kolirin’s childhood. “ When I was a kid, my family and I used to watch Egyptian movies,” he shared in 2007. “This was a fairly common Israeli family practice, circa the early 1980’s. In the late afternoon on Fridays, we’d watch with bated breaths the convoluted plots, the impossible loves and the heart-breaking pain of Omar Sharif, Pathen Hamama, I’del Imam, and the rest of that crew on the one and only TV channel that the country had. This was kind of weird, actually, for a country that spent half of its existence in a state of war with Egypt, and the other half in a sort of cold, correct peace with its neighbor to the south. Sometimes, after the Arab movie, they’d broadcast a performance of the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s orchestra.” Established in 1948, the IBA’s Arabic Orchestra, whose members were mostly Jewish immigrants from Iraq and Egypt, made it their mission to uplift and celebrate Arabic music in Israel and beyond.  

When The Band’s Visit was screened in New York at the Other Israel Film Festival, which is dedicated to the work of both Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, it caught the eye of theatre producer Orin Wolf. “I immediately hungered to put the story onstage,” he said in a 2018 interview with Dramatics . “For me, the filmmaker Eran Kolirin made what felt like a piece of theatre about people being stuck. That’s something that always interests me theatrically: people being stuck in one place. The story dealt with language barriers, people struggling to find the right words, and it was about musicians. It felt to me like it was a natural fit for the stage.” After several conversations, Wolf convinced Kolirin to grant him the stage rights to the story. At which point the producer, who had recently found success as part of the Broadway producing team for the film-to-musical Once, pondered whether to pursue the story as a play or a musical.  

Legendary Broadway producer Hal Prince, who was mentoring Wolf, connected him with playwright Itamar Moses (whose Bach at Lepzig played at Writers Theatre in 2007 ) and composer David Yazbe c k ( The Full Monty, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Women of the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown ) in 2013. Moses, whose parents are Israeli, and Yazbek, whose mother is Jewish and father Lebanese, both connected strongly with the material and saw its potential. Moses remembered, “I felt the intimacy of the story, how much it depended on small connections between individuals, which theatre excels at. How still it was. And there was a very organic reason for there to be music in it. First, there’s this band. And second, music is one of the zones of connection between the people, a language that the characters use to communicate. I thought, ‘OK, that justifies it being a musical.’”  

The team soon added its final member, director David Cromer, who hails from Skokie and has directed at WT many times over the years, most recently with Next to Normal in 2019 . Atlantic Theatre Company in New York produced the world premiere of the musical in late 2016, where it ran for two months. Reviews and response for the Off-Broadway production were strong, with the show winning several Drama Desk and Obie Awards. Could the musical successfully transfer to Broadway and find a broader audience for its quieter tale of human connection? Would it survive in a season that also included far more familiar titles, such as the original musicals Frozen , SpongeBob SquarePants , and Mean Girls as well as splashy revivals of beloved classics My Fair Lady, Carousel and Once on This Island?  

The answer was a resounding yes. The musical opened to rave reviews in November 2017, with The New York Times calling it “a Broadway rarity seldom found these days outside of the canon of Stephen Sondheim: an honest-to-God musical for grown-ups.” The production would end up running for over a year and a half. At the 2018 Tony Awards, the show went home with ten awards, including Best Musical, Book, Score, Actor, Actress and Director, making it only the fourth musical to win the unofficial “Big Six” awards. The cast recording would also win a 2019 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album.  

Writers Theatre and TheatreSquared’s co-production of The Band’s Visit marks the musical’s regional premiere, the first original production in America since the Broadway national tour.   

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The Band's Visit (2007)

Original title: ביקור התזמורת.

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A small Egyptian police band travels to Israel to play at the inaugural ceremony of an Arab arts center, only to find themselves stuck in the wrong town.

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Teen Girls Confront an Epidemic of Deepfake Nudes in Schools

Using artificial intelligence, middle and high school students have fabricated explicit images of female classmates and shared the doctored pictures.

After boys at Francesca Mani’s high school fabricated and shared explicit images of girls last year, she and her mother, Dorota, began urging schools and legislators to enact tough safeguards. Credit... Shuran Huang

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By Natasha Singer

Natasha Singer has covered student privacy for The Times since 2013. She reported this story from Westfield, N.J.

• April 8, 2024

Westfield Public Schools held a regular board meeting in late March at the local high school, a red brick complex in Westfield, N.J., with a scoreboard outside proudly welcoming visitors to the “Home of the Blue Devils” sports teams.

But it was not business as usual for Dorota Mani.

In October, some 10th-grade girls at Westfield High School — including Ms. Mani’s 14-year-old daughter, Francesca — alerted administrators that boys in their class had used artificial intelligence software to fabricate sexually explicit images of them and were circulating the faked pictures. Five months later, the Manis and other families say, the district has done little to publicly address the doctored images or update school policies to hinder exploitative A.I. use.

“It seems as though the Westfield High School administration and the district are engaging in a master class of making this incident vanish into thin air,” Ms. Mani, the founder of a local preschool, admonished board members during the meeting.

In a statement, the school district said it had opened an “immediate investigation” upon learning about the incident, had immediately notified and consulted with the police, and had provided group counseling to the sophomore class.

“All school districts are grappling with the challenges and impact of artificial intelligence and other technology available to students at any time and anywhere,” Raymond González, the superintendent of Westfield Public Schools, said in the statement.

Blindsided last year by the sudden popularity of A.I.-powered chatbots like ChatGPT, schools across the United States scurried to contain the text-generating bots in an effort to forestall student cheating. Now a more alarming A.I. image-generating phenomenon is shaking schools.

Boys in several states have used widely available “nudification” apps to pervert real, identifiable photos of their clothed female classmates, shown attending events like school proms, into graphic, convincing-looking images of the girls with exposed A.I.-generated breasts and genitalia. In some cases, boys shared the faked images in the school lunchroom, on the school bus or through group chats on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, according to school and police reports.

Such digitally altered images — known as “deepfakes” or “deepnudes” — can have devastating consequences. Child sexual exploitation experts say the use of nonconsensual, A.I.-generated images to harass, humiliate and bully young women can harm their mental health, reputations and physical safety as well as pose risks to their college and career prospects. Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that it is illegal to distribute computer-generated child sexual abuse material, including realistic-looking A.I.-generated images of identifiable minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

Yet the student use of exploitative A.I. apps in schools is so new that some districts seem less prepared to address it than others. That can make safeguards precarious for students.

“This phenomenon has come on very suddenly and may be catching a lot of school districts unprepared and unsure what to do,” said Riana Pfefferkorn , a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who writes about legal issues related to computer-generated child sexual abuse imagery .

At Issaquah High School near Seattle last fall, a police detective investigating complaints from parents about explicit A.I.-generated images of their 14- and 15-year-old daughters asked an assistant principal why the school had not reported the incident to the police, according to a report from the Issaquah Police Department. The school official then asked “what was she supposed to report,” the police document said, prompting the detective to inform her that schools are required by law to report sexual abuse, including possible child sexual abuse material. The school subsequently reported the incident to Child Protective Services, the police report said. (The New York Times obtained the police report through a public-records request.)

In a statement, the Issaquah School District said it had talked with students, families and the police as part of its investigation into the deepfakes. The district also “ shared our empathy ,” the statement said, and provided support to students who were affected.

The statement added that the district had reported the “fake, artificial-intelligence-generated images to Child Protective Services out of an abundance of caution,” noting that “per our legal team, we are not required to report fake images to the police.”

At Beverly Vista Middle School in Beverly Hills, Calif., administrators contacted the police in February after learning that five boys had created and shared A.I.-generated explicit images of female classmates. Two weeks later, the school board approved the expulsion of five students, according to district documents . (The district said California’s education code prohibited it from confirming whether the expelled students were the students who had manufactured the images.)

Michael Bregy, superintendent of the Beverly Hills Unified School District, said he and other school leaders wanted to set a national precedent that schools must not permit pupils to create and circulate sexually explicit images of their peers.

“That’s extreme bullying when it comes to schools,” Dr. Bregy said, noting that the explicit images were “disturbing and violative” to girls and their families. “It’s something we will absolutely not tolerate here.”

Schools in the small, affluent communities of Beverly Hills and Westfield were among the first to publicly acknowledge deepfake incidents. The details of the cases — described in district communications with parents, school board meetings, legislative hearings and court filings — illustrate the variability of school responses.

The Westfield incident began last summer when a male high school student asked to friend a 15-year-old female classmate on Instagram who had a private account, according to a lawsuit against the boy and his parents brought by the young woman and her family. (The Manis said they are not involved with the lawsuit.)

After she accepted the request, the male student copied photos of her and several other female schoolmates from their social media accounts, court documents say. Then he used an A.I. app to fabricate sexually explicit, “fully identifiable” images of the girls and shared them with schoolmates via a Snapchat group, court documents say.

Westfield High began to investigate in late October. While administrators quietly took some boys aside to question them, Francesca Mani said, they called her and other 10th-grade girls who had been subjected to the deepfakes to the school office by announcing their names over the school intercom.

That week, Mary Asfendis, the principal of Westfield High, sent an email to parents alerting them to “a situation that resulted in widespread misinformation.” The email went on to describe the deepfakes as a “very serious incident.” It also said that, despite student concern about possible image-sharing, the school believed that “any created images have been deleted and are not being circulated.”

Dorota Mani said Westfield administrators had told her that the district suspended the male student accused of fabricating the images for one or two days.

Soon after, she and her daughter began publicly speaking out about the incident, urging school districts, state lawmakers and Congress to enact laws and policies specifically prohibiting explicit deepfakes.

“We have to start updating our school policy,” Francesca Mani, now 15, said in a recent interview. “Because if the school had A.I. policies, then students like me would have been protected.”

Parents including Dorota Mani also lodged harassment complaints with Westfield High last fall over the explicit images. During the March meeting, however, Ms. Mani told school board members that the high school had yet to provide parents with an official report on the incident.

Westfield Public Schools said it could not comment on any disciplinary actions for reasons of student confidentiality. In a statement, Dr. González, the superintendent, said the district was strengthening its efforts “by educating our students and establishing clear guidelines to ensure that these new technologies are used responsibly.”

Beverly Hills schools have taken a stauncher public stance.

When administrators learned in February that eighth-grade boys at Beverly Vista Middle School had created explicit images of 12- and 13-year-old female classmates, they quickly sent a message — subject line: “Appalling Misuse of Artificial Intelligence” — to all district parents, staff, and middle and high school students. The message urged community members to share information with the school to help ensure that students’ “disturbing and inappropriate” use of A.I. “stops immediately.”

It also warned that the district was prepared to institute severe punishment. “Any student found to be creating, disseminating, or in possession of AI-generated images of this nature will face disciplinary actions,” including a recommendation for expulsion, the message said.

Dr. Bregy, the superintendent, said schools and lawmakers needed to act quickly because the abuse of A.I. was making students feel unsafe in schools.

“You hear a lot about physical safety in schools,” he said. “But what you’re not hearing about is this invasion of students’ personal, emotional safety.”

Natasha Singer writes about technology, business and society. She is currently reporting on the far-reaching ways that tech companies and their tools are reshaping public schools, higher education and job opportunities. More about Natasha Singer

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