Recent progress in video technology has had some alarming effects in South Korea, as a growing number of tech-savvy youngsters are using deepfake technology to produce sexual images of people, often their own peers, without their consent.
A recent report showed that there were 180 criminal cases related to deepfake images in 2023.
Of the 120 people punished for those crimes, 91 – or 75.8% – were teenagers, according to a report compiled by Representative Cho Eun-hee of the People Power Party, which used data provided by the National Police Agency.
Both the number of deepfake-related crimes as well as the percentage of such crimes perpetrated by teens have been trending upwards. In 2022, there were 156 cases of deepfake crimes – 61% of convictions were of teens.
“These digital sex crimes that inflict irreversible damage on the victims are spreading among teens, as if it were a game,” Cho said, calling for a systematic revision to prevent such crimes.
On Aug 21, the Busan Metropolitan Office of Education said four middle school students were being investigated by the police for using deepfake technology to digitally clone the faces of 18 students and two teachers. They made some 80 pornographic images of the victims, which they shared via mobile messenger apps.
There were 12 cases of students spreading pornographic deepfakes of fellow students in Busan in 2023, but there have been 15 cases in the first six months of 2024 alone.
On Jeju Island, the police recently caught a teenage student at an international school making deepfake pornography using the faces of at least 11 of his fellow students.
Deepfake crimes can take various forms. Sometimes the images are used to bully a victim, but they are also created to make money.
In 2022, a high school student was found guilty of selling pornography – including doctored photos of real people – to 110 people online, in exchange for gift certificates.
An official at the state-run Sunflower Centre, which provides counselling for victims of sexual abuse, told local media that while the overwhelming majority of the cases involved male students victimising females, students of both genders have also been reported to have victimised students of the same gender.
South Korean teens have easy access to artificial intelligence (AI) services. A survey of 2,261 teens published in May by the National Information Society Agency found that about 77.5% of teenagers in the country said they knew about generative AI, and over half – 52.1% – said they had used it.
Generative technology itself can be used to create all kinds of images, written content and music, and is a tool used across a number of industries. Very few of these tech-savvy Korean teens use it for illegal means, as indicated by data from the police.
But like any tool, it can be harmful in the wrong hands, and there has been growing concern over the harm that can be inflicted by its abuse. — The Korea Herald/ANN
