A corporal with the Pennsylvania state police pleaded guilty to creating over 3,000 AI-generated pornographic deepfakes, including from driver's license photos and a district court judge. Stephen Kamnik, 39, also admitted to related offenses like possessing child sexual abuse material and rifling through coworkers' underwear. He faces sentencing in July after being suspended without pay.
Stephen Kamnik, a 39-year-old corporal in the Pennsylvania state police, pleaded guilty on April 9 to nine felonies and six misdemeanors. The charges stem from his misuse of state resources to produce AI deepfakes for personal gratification, as stated by the Pennsylvania attorney general. Investigators found he accessed a secured database called JNET to obtain hundreds of photos of women, violating its policies that prohibit personal use. Some deepfakes were created at Montgomery County police barracks using state-owned devices, and one involved an unlawfully recorded video of a magisterial district judge edited for lewd purposes. Kamnik also secretly filmed coworkers and broke into the women's locker room at the barracks to go through their underwear. A stolen .22 caliber gun was found in his vehicle, and his devices contained child sexual abuse material. The investigation began in 2024 after officials noticed excessive internet bandwidth on his assigned computer and repeated use of an external hard drive, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Kamnik was arrested last year and has been suspended without pay since. He will be sentenced in July. This case echoes other AI deepfake incidents in eastern Pennsylvania, including high school cases in Lancaster, Radnor, and Council Rock North.
