hankyoreh

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In March 2023, Kim Ha-na (a pseudonym, 19) was in her final year of high school, busy preparing for Korea’s all-important college entrance exam, when she received a worrisome message on Instagram.

“Somebody is using your photos on X. Do you want me to send you a screenshot?”

With that, she was sent a pornographic image of herself made by feeding a photograph of her face from her Instagram account into an AI-based tool. 

“It’s a present for you — how do you like it?”

What she’d assumed was a concerned stranger turned out to be the perpetrator himself, and he unleashed a torrent of obscenities and sexual harassment at Kim.

The horror didn’t end there, however. For two more months, Kim continued to be the target of explicit deepfakes and sexual harassment. The perpetrator even threatened to send the deepfakes to her friends.

“That was the day my whole world collapsed,” she recalled.

Kim, who was still a minor when her image was exploited to make pornographic deepfakes, told the Hankyoreh on Wednesday the despair she’d felt, as if her whole world were falling apart.

Kim is one of many women all around the country, including young students, who are victims of sexually exploitative deepfakes that are proliferating on Telegram.

According to figures provided by the Women's Human Rights Institute of Korea, which reports to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, more than one-third of victims who have requested assistance from government organizations so far this year are minors (below 19 years of age).

“I saw the name of my high school on a recent list of schools where deepfake sex crimes had been committed. I made up my mind to go public about what I went through because I think victims shouldn’t let themselves be intimidated any longer,” she said.

What began with the creation and distribution of sexually exploitative deepfakes soon led to blackmail, which had a devastating impact on Kim’s life.

“At first, I just thought the perp was disgusting and pathetic. But when he started threatening to send the deepfakes to my classmates and boyfriend, I began to feel scared all the time and struggled to even leave the house,” she said.

“Later, I found myself distrusting everyone, and I eventually came to blame myself. I thought that this was happening to me because somebody hated me and that I must have done something wrong,” she recalled.

Kim did not manage to file a report about the incident because she didn’t know how.

“But then when I saw my high school on the list, it occurred to me that if I’d filed a report a year ago, I might have kept someone else from being victimized. That made me feel guilty,” she said.

“I don’t understand why the government hasn’t managed to eradicate digital sex crimes involving deepfakes after the Nth Room scandal on Telegram,” she added.

Legally speaking, the actions committed against Kim might count as blackmail and a violation of the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Crimes. In the case of sexually exploitative deepfakes involving a minor, even mere possession and viewing carries a minimum sentence of one year in prison.

“In such cases, the evidence needs to be immediately collected and reported to a police station or the municipal or provincial police agency. The faster you do that, the better,” said a spokesperson with the National Police Agency.

“The most practical steps that a victim can take are taking screenshots of the perpetrators’ Instagram account URL, the chat log, and the chat time and then reporting that to a police station or requesting help from the Advocacy Center for Online Sexual Abuse Victims,” said Seo Hye-jin, the human rights director at the Korean Women Lawyers Association and a lawyer at the Lighthouse Law Office.

The Advocacy Center for Online Sexual Abuse Victims provides consultations for victims of sexually exploitative deepfakes, helps them take down images online, and connects them with legal aid.

By Ko Na-rin, staff reporter

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]