South Korean authorities have launched a nationwide investigation.
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The South Korean president addressed the nation on a rather spicy occasion: the country was flooded with fake nude photos and erotic videos of respectable women. These fakes are mainly spread via the Telegram network by attackers, most of them high school and even elementary school teenagers. “Anyone can become a victim!” – said President Yoon Seok Yeol with despair in his voice. However, statistics say that the main risk groups, defenseless against perverts armed with artificial intelligence, are teachers, female officers and beautiful university students.
South Korean authorities have launched a nationwide investigation and begun threatening retaliation after the country uncovered an entire network for the production and exchange of “deepfakes” – images and videos created using artificial intelligence that are very difficult to distinguish from real images, Wall Street Journal reports. We are talking about hundreds of women involved, the publication notes.
In this case, South Korea was disappointed by its own achievement: universal digitalisation, where citizens work and relax on the Internet. According to the Wall Street Journal, this has led to more than half of the world’s production of deepfakes “not recommended for children” being done in South Korea, by children. That’s the paradox.
And so the South Korean state decided to take on the shameless youngsters. “Some may dismiss deepfakes as jokes,” said President Yoon Seok-yeol. “But in fact, these are actions by criminals who use modern technology to hide behind a shield of anonymity. We will not tolerate this.”
The Ministry of Education promises to “implement” a series of punishments for distributors of erotic fakes from high schools. Repressive measures can affect even ten-year-old children. Considering the fact that Koreans are a conservative and tough nation, very devoted to traditional values, punishments will not be the problem. Moreover, they will most likely be collective. It turned out that group chats with this topic on Telegram are based on local characteristics. Pupils from the same school, students from the same university or simply neighbors in the area share with each other fantasies created by AI about one or another mutual friend. Now, after the collective phantoms of the imagination, the general punishment will come.
The Wall Street Journal believes that it is no coincidence that South Korean leaders launched a crusade against content distributed via Telegram shortly after the arrest of the founder of this network in France. Apparently, in Seoul they heard the accusations made against Pavel Durov in Paris.
