South Korea has passed the most draconian anti-deepfake porn law yet, with young men facing three years simply for looking at deepfake porn. The law comes amidst a huge moral panic over deepfake porn in the increasingly Christian country. Although the vast majority of deepfake porn there involves female K-pop stars and other celebrities, there have been scandals involving ordinary members of the public, including high-school girls. Apparently, this has led to thousands of South Korean women scrambling to take down every selfie they ever posted online, for fear of being nudified.
South Korean men who fall foul of the new law could face a fine of up to $23,000 if the judge decides to spare them a prison term. Draconian though the new law is, many young feminist activists don’t feel it goes far enough, and are demanding even stiffer penalties (as in the featured image above, which shows a protest at a South Korean university).
According to recent research, most of the people making deepfake porn in the country are young men, including teenage boys. However, almost as popular as visual deepfake porn, and something that existed long before it, is ‘fan fiction’. This involves the sharing of written fantasies involving real people, including male K-pop celebrities, often involving hardcore scenarios, including rape. The difference here is that most of the creators and consumers of fan fiction are young South Korean females. No doubt, generative AI is helping to take such fan fiction to ‘the next level’, but there are no moral panics or outrages in South Korea about this.
South Korea is in the near end stage of a cataclysmic drop in the birth rate, the lowest in the world. Not only will their rapidly aging population have a devastating effect on the economy, but before long, there simply wont be enough young males to serve in the army, and therefore there wont be enough soldiers to defend against an invasion by their North Korean neighbours.
One might think that the deepfake problem in South Korea, might at least be put into the context of the demographic problem. A rational society might frame it in the context of young men and women not having sex, not dating, and not getting married and starting families. And yes, the rise in incels, and what to do about it. But instead, it’s placed entirely in the ideological prism of radical feminism, with a little bit of Christian sexual puritanism thrown in. According to South Korean feminists who lobbied for the new law, the source of the problem is entirely toxic masculinity and patriarchy. South Korean schoolboys must be given lessons in consent and respect. Even the President of South Korea agrees – a man who recently pushed back against radical feminism, by refusing to appoint a new replacement for the outgoing minister of gender equality.
A Rational Debate On Deepfake Porn Is Needed, But Unlikely
As soon as AI porn generators started to appear, along with the increasing number and popularity of
nudify and ‘reface’ apps, I knew that society was heading for a huge moral panic and a resultingly equally massive legislative backlash. Whilst locking up more and more men, including young men and even teenage boys, might be the obvious answer, it behooves us to ask where it will end? Because, as any follower of this blog, or any intelligent future of sex and porn tech enthusiast will understand, nudifying a clothed photo is only the beginning. Fast forward five or ten years time, and the tech will be there to create a virtual clone of anybody you like (at least anybody who has a sufficient and available social media presence), and have them as your sexual partner in hyperrealistic virtual or augmented reality, near indistinguishable from the real person. Presumably, at least in countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Korea, to have virtual sex with such a virtual AI clone will become legally classed as rape, and probably treated as seriously as actual physical rape. But if the apps or sites exist, then it’s going to be pretty hard to stop many of the growing cohort of lonely young men in society from giving into temptation, and having virtual sex with their AI deepfaked K-pop crushes. And as we have seen here recently, AI boyfriends are massively popular in places like China and South Korea. Whilst ‘fan fiction’ devotees may get a free pass now, perhaps it will be different when young women are using the same tech to have virtual sex with male celebrities. And it is probably only when young women are being jailed in numbers, unlikely though that scenario is, that society will start to reflect rationally upon the issues, and treat them with a sense of proportion and objectivity.
