Crestwood schools stop livestreams in light of AI

Citing concerns about artificial intelligence, Crestwood’s Board of Education has pulled the plug on its livestreams.

Crestwood Local Schools Superintendent Aireane Curtis said she and district Treasurer Katie Hoffmeister attended a June 2025 meeting of area administrators where an attendee said their voice had been cloned to send out a fake message to staff.

“The superintendent that was scammed was in the room,” Curtis said. “He was tipped off by, luckily, a very smart staff member who called him and said, ‘Why are you asking me for this personal information?’”

Concerned that district superintendents and treasurers are being targeted, Curtis said she discussed her concerns with Crestwood board members last summer.

The board’s minutes — which Ohio law stipulates are the only official record of its proceedings — reflect no mention of such a conversation in June, July or August of 2026. (Audio recordings are considered transitory, or unofficial, documents.)

The Portager reached out to Curtis to ask if future board minutes will be more complete, but received no reply.

The board in October of 2025 agreed to end meeting livestreams as of January of 2026. The board will revisit its decision in April, taking community feedback into account, she said.

With years of livestreams already published and the policy not prohibiting meeting attendees from making their own audio/visual recordings, the board’s attempt to thwart AI may have limited effectiveness.

“I don’t think you can prevent it,” county IT Director Cameron Singer said. “Realistically, a 30-second conversation is enough to pick up a voice tone to understand how somebody speaks. It just takes somebody willing to do it.”

Also, any board member or school official who has a social media account, or who shows up on someone else’s social media account, is unwittingly creating visual and perhaps audio fodder for deep fakes, he said.

“Depending on what the bad actor would want to do, realistically if those social media profiles are public, all you’d need is to find out the board members’ names, and then you can go search Facebook or social media profiles, and then from there, you have all the imagery you’d want. If they have videos out there, it's easy to build their voices,” he said.

It is possible to delete YouTube videos, but they can still be found via cached pages, archived copy or saved reference searches.

Curtis did not respond to The Portager’s request for a response to Singer’s comments.