The Mystery of South Korea's Deepfake Crisis

Supply is elastic

Korean women protest in Seoul.

South Korea has long been known for its rapid embrace of new technologies, boasting some of the world’s fastest internet speeds and companies at the forefront of consumer electronics.

Now the nation is becoming a world leader in the use of AI—specifically, deepfake pornography. Through group chats on the messaging platform Telegram, anonymous users have created troves of fake porn using the faces of non-consenting Korean women. According to a 2023 report by the US startup Security Hero, South Korean celebrities constitute a staggering 53 percent of individuals featured in deepfakes worldwide. Besides celebrities, many victims are underage students.

Within much of the media, the issue is being framed as another example of deeply embedded Korean sexism. According to the South China Morning Post, experts—from what discipline I cannot parse—are “warning that systemic misogyny and inadequate enforcement have allowed digital sexual abuse to proliferate unchecked.” Opaque experts supplied at the New York Times have taken a more modest tone, noting that “in South Korea, enthusiasm for new technologies can sometimes outpace concerns about their ethical implications.” Some have pointed to a lack of comprehensive sex education as a culprit, while others have focused their ire on big tech companies, whose moderation guidelines they deem insufficient. Telegram traditionally does not moderate its users' private chats, which led to its founder’s arrest in France last month. (The platform is now changing its position.)

Certainly, men who spread pornographic images of non-consenting women deserve punishment, and Korean women have pointed to cases of lax enforcement of existing rules. But it is unclear how much can be done to stem the tide when most perpetrators are teenagers acting anonymously in obscure group chats. It is trivially easy to generate deepfake porn—much easier than real porn. The only necessary inputs are a picture of a face and an algorithm. While Telegram has become the bête noire of many authorities, other platforms, such as Signal, offer fully encrypted services, making detection still more difficult. Any full solution would require throwing privacy concerns to the wind. That is not an incontestable proposition unless you are the French government.

But let’s reexamine why South Korea has so much deepfake porn to begin with. Is this squarely a matter of misogyny and erotic tech enthusiasm as the experts have suggested? Those are possible contributors, but I suspect a more prominent cause is that South Korea is one of the only developed countries that makes the production and distribution of porn illegal, even though consumption is not prosecuted.

Legal status of pornography.

As the deepfake crisis shows, porn still gets made in Korea, but legal restrictions mean there is no formal industry with established performers. Since demand for porn made with native Korean women (and men) remains high, anonymous amateurs have become the default suppliers of such content. Some are now exploiting AI to rope in innocent students and pop stars absent a legal pool of consenting performers. Before the viability of deepfake technology, spycams were the preferred mechanism.

It is notable that Japan, a nation long known for both sexism and porn consumption, does not appear to have a deepfake crisis of the same scale. Where media reports do exist, they tend to focus on scammers. Of course, if you have ever visited the top floor of a manga shop in Akihabara, you will have likely noticed that the nation’s demand for erotic content is being sated (by a wide variety of means, it must be said). While Japan requires the censorship of genitalia in porn productions, this has done little to dampen an industry that employs 10,000 performers and generates nearly $400 million in revenue each year. Japanese performers enjoy such notoriety throughout East Asia that Taipei once issued a metro card featuring a picture of the popular starlet Yui Hatano.

Ironically, the architects of Korea’s current porn restrictions have long cited preventing sex crimes as an impetus for the censorship. Former President Lee Myung-Bak, under whom the ban on internet porn was enacted in 2009, claimed that “obscene materials and harmful information that can be easily accessed on the internet are singled out as one cause inciting sex crimes.” Perhaps he was right to say “one cause.”

If this were the best of all possible worlds, no young men would look at porn, but, alas, demand among this demographic seems quite resilient. That is all the more true in a nation where there is traditionally little cultural hangup about masturbation, despite opposition from a Christian minority overrepresented in positions of power. The question is: is it better to supply demand with a legal porn industry, or a highly informal one?

South Korea has plenty of pop stars. To uphold an ethical division of labor, perhaps it is time to allow for porn stars, too.