Elliston Berry woke up on an October morning during her freshman year of high school to a text from her friend.

She was frantic. Photos of the two of them without clothes were circulating around their school. But Berry had never sent anyone a nude photo. Someone had generated the images with artificial intelligence.

Neither girl knew what to do.

“I was completely, completely shocked,” Berry, then 14, told The Post. “I was crying all morning, and I couldn’t even come out of my bedroom.”

This nightmare scenario is, sadly, becoming common across the US as people misuse AI to create images which are getting ever more realistic.

The Post has spoken to teenage victims, teachers and parents who have all been affected by this sick phenomenon, which schools and cops seem to have little power to stem or punish.

At first, Berry, who is now 16, was frightened and resolved to keep the matter to herself, hoping she could make it go away.

“I didn’t want to tell my parents,” she said. “They have always told me about why it’s so important not to send nudes, so if there’s this AI nude of me, I don’t want my parents to think that this is what I’m doing.”

But ultimately Berry’s mother got the truth out — and took her straight to the principal’s office to get to the bottom of it.

“As I went through school, I was completely embarrassed. I was ashamed. It felt like everyone was looking at me,” Berry said. “I was convinced my entire school had seen the images.”

The Fort Worth, Texas, school opened up an investigation, but the perpetrator continued to target more and more girls over the course of the week, attaching threats to the images. He declared that he wanted to “ruin the girls” and to “go out with a bang.”

“I was scared for my safety,” Berry said. “I didn’t know the intention behind these images. I didn’t know why he sent them out.”

The perpetrator erred five days into the smear campaign, when he logged into the Snapchat account he used to post the images on school WiFi and got nabbed.

“I was like there was no way it could be him, he was so nice,” Berry said. “When we had a class together in 8th grade, he gave me a Bible.”

Berry’s mother, Anna McAdams, wanted to see him expelled and appealed to the school board and the superintendent. But she was shut down time and again because there was no explicit law he broke or school rule he violated.

“We felt unheard and just dismissed at every turn,” McAdams said. “No one knew what to do because there are no laws, and he was a minor. The school didn’t really help us out. The local police didn’t know what to do. It was just heart wrenching not being able to help her.”

The student ended up with a slap on the wrist: a brief in-school suspension. His parents opted to pull him out of the school the next semester.

But the images lingered online for nine months. Berry and her family learned a hard lesson: virtually no protections exist for victims of AI porn.

But they’re setting out to change that, teaming up with Senator Ted Cruz to champion the bipartisan Take It Down Act, which just passed overwhelmingly in Congress on April 28.

The bill, which is now headed to President Trump’s desk, would make it illegal to knowingly publish or threaten to publish intimate images without a person’s consent. That includes AI-generated deepfakes.

Berry also recently met with First Lady Melania Trump at the White House to discuss the importance of the bill. “It’s heartbreaking to witness some teens, especially girls, grappling with the overwhelming challenges posed by malicious online content,” the First Lady said at the April 28 event.

The number of young women being targeted with nonconsensual pornographic AI images is growing. Eleven percent of 9-to-17-year-olds say they are personally aware of peers using AI to create pornographic images of others. Another 10% declined to answer. 

Another victim is Julianna Sabonis. 

The 20-year-old from Mankato, Minnesota, was contacted three months ago by a seemingly friendly Instagram account who informed her that someone had posted AI-generated naked images of her to Reddit.

As she later found out, the message was from the perpetrator.

“I clicked on the profile, and it was a bunch of Photoshopped images of me naked from my TikTok and from my Instagram,” Sabonis, who is an influencer, said. “But it doesn’t really look like my body even.”

Some images were made by putting her face on someone else’s body. Others virtually removed clothing from existing images.

The perpetrator began contacting her, taking credit for the images.

“The messages I would get were graphic, like, ‘I’m sure you’re crying your eyes out. I’m sure I’ve ruined your life. This isn’t going to stop.’ So I just kind of lied because what else am I going to say? You’re right, I’m upset,” she recalled.

She stayed stoic in her interactions with the perpetrator, but the entire experience has been traumatizing.

“It definitely upset me, but I lied. It was especially upsetting as somebody who’s experienced sexual violence,” she said, adding the other incident was unrelated to the AI pictures.

When he didn’t get a rise out of her, the perpetrator escalated the attack and sent fifteen AI-generated nudes to Sabonis’s mother.

“My mom said that she knew it wasn’t my body because I am her daughter, and it’s missing birthmarks and all of those things, but she was obviously incredibly disgusted to have seen it,” she said.

But, thanks to some stealthy investigative work, Sabonis says she’s identified the perpetrator. And she’s fortunate to live in Minnesota, where state-level legislation combatting AI porn already exists.

“I do intend to press charges,” she said. “I want to sue for as much as I can, not for any kind of financial gratification, but because I’m sure he’s harassing other women too.”

Teachers are getting caught in the crosshairs of AI also.

Angela Tipton, an 8th grade English teacher in Indianapolis, found out that someone had used AI to create a naked image of her when the photo was sent to her twin 15-year-old sons.

“My own children thought it was real,” Tipton, 45, told The Post. “They received the image, and they sent it to me, and immediately I knew it wasn’t me, but it was definitely my face, and it freaked me out.”

The perpetrators then went on to post the image to an Instagram account and tag her two sons — on their fifteenth birthday.

“I think sometimes when things happen to adults, people think, well they can handle it, but they don’t think about the fact that we have children too, and my kids just saw what they thought was my vagina wide open,” she said. 

The harassment her family endured was relentless.

“Kids texted my sons, ‘Your mom’s got a pretty p—y,’” she said. “I can’t figure out if it was an attack on me or an attack on my kids, but the impact on our whole family is immeasurable.”

And school became a humiliating hell: “If I was walking to lunch, kids would kind of start giggling, or they’d come stand in my doorway and then run away when I looked up. I started feeling like I was a student being bullied.”

Initially the school was helpful and found the perpetrators, who turned out to be five boys in her 8th grade class — all of whom were friendly with her sons. But the school’s hands were tied because there were no laws or school rules regulating deepfakes.

They decided to suspend the boys for five days and had them write apology emails to Tipton. 

“They didn’t seem to think it was that serious,” she recalled. “The kids who created the image initially were just like, ‘Who really cares, it’s not actually you.’”

When the boys returned, she was horrified to find they were right back in her own classroom.

“I didn’t feel comfortable with these kids around me,” she said. “I didn’t want to be in their presence every day.”

On the day of their return, after two decades of teaching, she walked out and resigned on the spot. But the AI nudes still followed her.

“I deal with it every week. I run into a kid who did it, or I run into one of their parents. I live on the same street as one of the boys who did it,” she said. “My kids still have to defend me pretty regularly, like, ‘Oh, my mom’s not a porn star, my mom’s not a stripper.’”

Tipton says the situation brought her to new lows. 

“I did deal with depression for the first time in my life,” she recalled. “I absolutely wanted to die, and I remember thinking, like, if this would happen to a kid, there’s no way they would live.”

And she says her situation has caused palpable fear on her former campus.

“I had female students reach out to me afraid this would happen to them,” she said. “They can just pull [a picture] out of the yearbook, and it could be any of us.”