South Korean lawmakers have passed a law banning the possession and viewing of sexually explicit content. deepfake images and video, according to the Reuters news agency. The new law was adopted by South Korea’s National Assembly on Thursday. All it needs is President Yoon Suk Yeol’s signature of approval before it can be signed into law.
Under the new bill, anyone who buys, saves or watches such content could be sentenced to three years in prison or fined up to the equivalent of $22,600.
It is already illegal in South Korea to create sexually explicit deepfake material with the intention of distributing the content, with offenders facing up to five years in prison or a fine of around 38 000 dollars under the Sexual Violence Prevention and Victim Protection Act.
ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images
If the new legislation is enacted, the maximum sentence for the crime of creating deepfake pornography would be increased to seven years, regardless of whether the creator intended to distribute the images, according to Reuters.
South Korean public opinion has been outraged in recent years by the exchange of sexually explicit images manipulated by AI and deepfakes. Last month, authorities launched an investigation into such content allegedly shared through chat rooms on the messaging app Telegram.
An investigation by South Korean journalist Ko Narin for the Hankyoreh newspaper, published in August, found that the faces of several female Seoul National University graduates appeared on sexually explicit deepfake materials produced and distributed by men with whom they had studied.
“I was shocked at how systematic and organized the process was,” Ko told CBS News sister network BBC News earlier this month. “The most horrible thing I discovered was a group of underage students in a school [to share content] which had more than 2,000 members.
The dissemination of such images among young people in South Korea appears to be a widespread problem. A total of 387 people have been arrested this year alone for crimes related to deepfake sexual content, 80 percent of whom are teenagers, South Korea’s national news agency Yonhap reported this week, citing police data.
The investigation into Telegram was announced shortly after the tech company’s decision. CEO Pavel Durov has been indicted by French authorities with multiple crimes, including the allegation that its platform was used to spread child sexual abuse material.
As CBS News reportedFake explicit images of pop icon Taylor Swift quickly spread on Elon Musk’s social media platform X earlier this year, attracting millions of views and prompting X (formerly Twitter) to temporarily block searches on the artist in January.
In May, two U.S. senators co-authored bipartisan bill aimed at repressing non-consensual intimate deepfake images online. The legislation proposes penalties including fines and up to two years in prison, with civil penalties of up to $150,000.
