A few dozen women wearing white masks gathered with signs in their hands denouncing pornographic “deepfakes”. On Friday evening, August 30, several South Korean feminist groups demonstrated in Seoul to fight against these sexual crimes that are flooding the country. Because if the alerts about these hyperfakes, which superimpose, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), faces on sexual content, have been increasing in recent months, the concern has become a tidal wave at the end of the summer.
On August 22, the media Hankyoreh He mentioned the existence of a Korean bot on Telegram that allows you to create a “deepfake” with a single click and for about 650 won (44 euro cents). pornographic images of anyone. A service used by almost 227,000 people at the time. In the process, investigations by Internet users and journalists multiplied, revealing an infinite number of Telegram channels dedicated to sharing hyper-falsified sexual images of young South Korean women. Victims mainly of people close to the attackers.
Some channels are personal, like this (now deleted) chat room infiltrated by The world and dedicated to a single student named Jiwon. In the group, some of the thirty members were busy transmitting photographs of the young woman, while the others used them to generate pornographic content.
Others, nicknamed “Family Rooms,” You can see young men attacking their sisters or cousins, spreading “deepfakes”, surreptitiously taken photographs or even videos of their incestuous touching. The various channels discovered can include a dozen members, as well as several tens of thousands of subscribers.
Specific educational establishments
However, educational institutions remain the main targets of this constellation of Telegram networks. “Usually, each channel focuses on a single middle school, high school, or college, probably because they are run by young students from these establishments.”“Explains Ji-Ah* (the first names marked with an asterisk have been changed), a netizen and social media activist who has been monitoring existing channels for a week. A collective called DataSec has even developed an online map, the “Deepfake Map” (inaccessible at the time of publication of this article), which catalogues all the schools supposedly targeted by a channel. On Friday, August 30, their number rose to 632: in a city like Jeonju, near the west coast, ten of the city’s eleven high schools are said to be affected.
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