A TWISTED teacher has been jailed after secretly snapping pictures of schoolgirls in their uniform and trading AI-generated nude depictions of them online for images of child sexual abuse.
Christopher Gerald Savage, 38, fed images of girls he had covertly taken as well as those he had found online to a chatbot and told it to undress them.
He then traded those AI images with 13 users on Telegram in exchange for more than 1100 child abuse images, the Ipswich District Court heard.
Savage pleaded guilty to 31 child abuse-related offences, The Courier Mail reported .
He was sentenced to six years behind bars on Thursday after admitting to storing more than 53,000 images and videos, in Ipswich, near Brisbane, .
Savage targeted more than 20 children aged between 12 and 17 with his AI depictions.
He described having sexual interest in children as young as 10, the court heard.
One of his victims told the court that the twisted crimes had “cut her so deep”.
She said: “I’m here to express how negatively you have impacted my life and many others.
“Knowing that someone I knew and thought I trusted could do this to me and others makes me feel sick.
“When I first started to talk to people about this, all anyone could say was that they were extremely sorry and they felt so bad for me.
“Because of you, I will never be able to maintain a healthy relationship with anyone, especially men.”
When he was arrested in September 2024, Savage was a head of department at Lowood State High School.
Cops raided his home that month, finding files that showed sexual abuse of children, including infants, across eight devices.
But the sick school teacher was not working at that school when he took the photos of young girls, between 2023 and 2024.
Prosecutors said he admitted to masturbating to the AI images in messages.
Judge Craig Chowdhury said: “You spent considerable time and effort engaging in cumulative child pornography but also engaging in going around and photographing these children who you should be looking out for.
“You mastered your own destiny and mastered your own domain, and you made your choice to go down this dark road.”
Savage was sentenced to six years in and had his teaching registration suspended.
