Digital-Exposed Kids: Reflecting on Deepfake Porn Scandal in Korea
Last summer in South Korea, a large-scale digital sex crime stunned the public. It was uncovered that a vast number of group chats were involved in creating and sharing sexual photographs of women using “deepfakes”—which is an artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can generate images and videos by deep learning. Specifically, they were finding photos of female acquaintances from social media and sexually manipulating them in the chatrooms. What is worse was that most of the chatrooms were run by teenagers—73.6% of the arrested suspects of fake videos in the first half of 2024, according to the Korean National Police Agency.
My project raises critical awareness about this incident and further reinforces the need in Korea for enhanced education on digital ethics, greater accountability from social media platforms, and stronger legal protections for women. Illustrating my own analysis, I remixed my idea with the artwork called Police Kids, 2005, by Banksy. Through his satirical and ironic style, I critique the societal factors that contributed to the incident.
Unlike the characters in Banksy’s artwork, the ones in my artwork are teenagers. The girl might seem similar to the original, however, if you take a closer look, she is way different. She represents female teenagers in Korea, as her clothing depicts a typical Korean middle and high school uniform. When you look at the face of this girl, her eyebrows are furrowed and her mouth is turned down. Her facial expression conveys a mixed emotion of disgust, frustration, and anger towards the perpetrators of the sex crime. Meanwhile, observe the boy’s face; his smile is unmistakable. This directly reflects the behaviors of men in the chatrooms committing digital crimes behind their keyboards for their amusement, while the women of the doctored pornographs suffer from lifetime trauma. The stark contrast of countenance highlights the normalization of their harmful behavior being treated as entertaining, regardless of the impacts on victims. Also, the fact that the boy appears to be holding the girl’s arms implies the disturbing reality that the teenagers exploited their friends’ faces to create non-consensual pornographies.
When you look at what the boy is holding, I drew a phone in his hand with its screen pixelated, which symbolizes deepfake. Perpetrators wield deepfake as their weapon without any ethical responsibilities. I believe this kind of digital sex crime stems from a lack of education about sex, as well as the responsible use of technology. Much like the books and papers depicted in the background, Korea is widely recognized for its high emphasis on education, followed by the intense academic workload from a young age. They teach and study so diligently, but overlook the more fundamental goal: to be decent human beings before knowledgeable ones. As a student who grew up in Korea, I can say that sex education in Korea is virtually nonexistent. I rarely received it throughout my entire school life. This is not merely an educational issue, as it contributes to the occurrence of sex crimes. Rather, it leads to social ethics issues. On top of it, coming to the age of AI, the proper use of those technologies must be informed, especially to children, who are not aware of the expansive dangers they might cause. However, there is no such idea, including media literacy education, in the current Korean academic curriculum. A lot of experts are also pointing this out as an underlying cause of the incident and the reason why relatively young men, teenagers, happen to be offenders of sex crime. I believe this irony of education must be solved without delay, by focusing on what children truly need to learn to socially engage with others.
In fact, I intended for the screen to display the Telegram logo, behind pixelation. Telegram is a messaging platform that features private “secret chats,” providing strong encryption of chat data. As the user’s privacy is its key selling point, the founder of Telegram often resists sharing data, even when it’s linked to illegal activities. Thus, it is no wonder, that the spread of deepfake pornographs also happened through Telegram, as have all other various crimes, and continues to do so. The pixelated part below the girl’s hand portrays the media slipping from her grasp; it symbolizes the uncontrollable spread of the sexual content, followed by the infinite harm it causes to her, the subject of the content. Especially in the age of highly advanced internet technology, it is indispensable to monitor the appropriate use of digital platforms. There should be certain regulations to protect the fundamental dignity of individuals. In this case, keeping not only the coexistence between humans and technology but also the progress of feminism requires Telegram to cooperate in preventing sexual crimes. I believe there is more than enough potential to set up a system that filters out or reports sexual content. It is deeply troubling that Telegram is intentionally failing to take action and neglecting the social impact it could make. The pixelation of my artwork actively draws the audience’s attention to the critical role of digital platforms nowadays, questioning Telegram’s inaction in the prevention of pornography crime victims, as well as protection. Beyond Telegram, this notion could extend to the other AI platforms that enabled this crime. While the specific websites or programs used by the perpetrators to manipulate the images have not been identified, it is clear that they lack regulations too.
In my artwork, while the boy is wearing a bulletproof police vest, the girl is not. This differentiation implies gender injustice in modern Korean society: the police and legal system are only protecting men while neglecting women’s safety. They are not on the side of women, particularly when it comes to sexual crimes. According to the National Survey on Cyber Violence, teenagers mostly responded that the cause of the spread and reproduction of digital sex crimes was “because the punishment is weak” and “because there is no concern about getting caught due to the anonymity.” As the results prove, the legal system in Korea has been marginalizing women. It has been told that the police are not willing to investigate these kinds of crimes, making excuses regarding the data security of Telegram, which leaves a lot of cases unpunished. The recurrence of the deepfake pornography incident itself also reflects the absence of effective legal countermeasures in Korea, as a similar incident occurred six years ago. This previous case was bigger, even more severe, involving over 60,000 accomplices in the spread of sexually exploitative videos, including cybersex trafficking—also in Telegram chatrooms. However, the case ended with one main perpetrator being sentenced to 20 years, which brought us to this situation of teenagers committing almost identical crimes again. The need for more thorough investigations could not be more urgent. Additionally, establishing the law to enforce digital services to impose penalties for unethical actions and hold them responsible could greatly reduce the likelihood of digital sex crimes. By bringing the focus on this incident, my artwork highlights the responsibilities the Korean legal system must take: revising the laws to protect women’s dignity and prevent their lives from being destroyed by the misuse of AI technology. Having a clear, distinct purpose and factors in artworks that are distinguished from past works makes them original. And those often contain the perspective representing artists’ identities. My identity being a woman in Korea allows me to maintain the originality of my project, despite remixing with existing artwork by Banksy. The unique experiences I had accumulated throughout my entire life in Korea are demonstrated in various parts of the artwork, as elaborated above, and they perpetuate in its overall message: the improvement in current Korean society’s education, social media platforms, and legal systems are crucial for women’s safety from digital sex crimes. As shown in my project, remixing arts can serve as a powerful, yet still widely accessible tool to critique pressing societal issues, encouraging a deeper consideration of certain changes. I developed skills to apply more critical insights when approaching artworks, or even events going on around the world, throughout this course, The Art of the Steal: Remixing, Originality and Identity. Although I was aware of this deepfake pornography incident when it happened earlier this year, looking back at it now, it opened a new pathway of thinking for me. After all the projects I’ve worked on in the course, especially the last critical update project with a feminist lens, I transformed into a more engaged audience in the current society.