The president of South Korea has called on authorities to act to ‘eliminate’ the nation’s digital sex crime with a tidal wave of fake nude images of young women.
In recent times, officials, media, and members of the social media community detected many chat groups where users were generating and publishing sexually suggestive ‘deepfake’ images of underage girls.
They are produced using artificial intelligence technologies and are frequently the real person’s head on a fake human body.
It was reported that the media regulator of South Korea is planning to have an emergency meeting over the discoveries made.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeo on Tuesday directed agencies to “actively investigate and solve these digital sex crimes to eliminate them.”.
Recently, there are deepfake videos specific to an unspecified number of people and spread through SNS,’ Yoon said at the cabinet meeting.
The victims are usually young and defenseless, while the assailants are even still in their teenhood.
These latest spate of chat groups, affiliated to various individual schools and universities across the country, were found on the social media application, Telegram, in the past one week.
People sometimes shared photos of their friends—that is, students, mostly teenagers—and others created sexually explicit, deepfake content based on these images.
The discoveries come after the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested on Saturday following the claims that child sexual abuse, drug trade, and fraud were taking place in the encrypted messaging app.
Cybersex crimes in South Korea have a very checkered past.
The next year of 2019, a case of a group of men who have used a Telegram chatroom to extort dozens of young women to perform sexual lewdness became public, the case popularly known as nth-room. Cho Ju-bin, the ringleader of the group, got 42 years imprisonment.
