In 2020, as the South Korean authorities were pursuing a blackmail ring that forced young women to make sexually explicit videos for paying viewers, they found something else floating through the dark recesses of social media: pornographic images with other people’s faces crudely attached.
They didn’t know what to do with these early attempts at deepfake pornography. In the end, the National Assembly enacted a vaguely worded law against those making and distributing it. But that did not prevent a crime wave, using A.I. technolog y, that has now taken the country’s misogynistic online culture to new depths.
In the past two weeks, South Koreans have been shocked to find that a rising number of young men and teenage boys had taken hundreds of social media images of classmates, teachers and military colleagues — almost all young women and girls, including minors — and used them to create sexually exploitative images and video clips with deepfake apps.
They have spread the material through chat rooms on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, some with as many as 220,000 members. The deepfakes usually combine a victim’s face with a body in a sexually explicit pose, taken from pornography . The technology is so sophisticated that it is often hard for ordinary people to tell they are fake, investigators say. As the country scrambles to address the threat, experts have noted that in South Korea, enthusiasm for new technologies can sometimes outpace concerns about their ethical implications.
But to many women, these deepfakes are just the latest online expression of a deep-rooted misogyny in their country — a culture that has now produced young men who consider it fun to share sexually humiliating images of women online.
“Korean society doesn’t treat women as fellow human beings,” said Lee Yu-jin, a student whose university is among the hundreds of middle schools, high schools and colleges where students have been victimized. She asked why the government had not done more “before it became a digital culture to steal photos of friends and us e them for sexual humiliation.”
Online sexual violence is a growing problem globally, but South Korea is at the leading edge. Whether, and how, it can tackle the deepfake problem successfully will be watched by policymakers, school officials and law enforcement elsewhere.
The country has an underbelly of sexual criminality that has occasionally surfaced. A South Korean was convicted of running one of the world’s largest sites for images of child sexual abuse. A K-pop entertainer was found guilty of facilitating prostitution through a nightclub. For years, the police have battled spycam porn. And the mastermind of the blackmail ring investigated in 2020 was sentenced to 40 years in prison for luring young women, including teenagers, to make the videos that he sold online through Telegram chat rooms.
The rise of easy-to-use deepfake technology has added an insidious dimension to such forms of sexual violence : The victims are often unaware that they are victims until they receive an anonymous message, or a call from the police.
