Unsafe workplaces, marketed students: The deepfake policy gap in education

This paper interrogates the challenges that deepfake media and AI-generated synthetic content pose for educational policy, governance, and the evolving notion of classroom safety. Moving beyond traditional paradigms that center student welfare and physical security, the analysis foregrounds the neglected psychosocial risks facing teachers, whose occupational safety is increasingly threatened by gendered forms of digitally mediated violence. Drawing on Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology and Manne’s analysis of misogyny, I situate deepfake harms within broader structural inequalities and neoliberal logics that commodify both teacher and student identities. Using Rahm’s concept of “educational imaginaries,” the paper presents two vignettes. The first shows how teachers face new OHS risks through real-time, technology-enabled abuse. The second shows how marketing uses of student images create additional vectors for consent violation and institutional risk. The analysis critiques current governance frameworks and calls for intersectional, anticipatory policies that address both relational and systemic dimensions of AI-facilitated harm. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reimagining of classroom safety that embeds gender justice, psychosocial well-being, and collective accountability at the center of AI governance in education, for education.