After South Korean authorities vowed to crack down on deepfake porn following revelations about chatrooms targeting minors at schools and universities, social media users shared an image of a woman generated with artificial intelligence (AI) in which she appeared to say in a media interview that all men in the East Asian country were "potential criminals". The Instagram user who first posted the image wrote it was AI-generated, but that disclaimer was omitted after it recirculated online.
"South Korean men are essentially potential criminals. I have taken down all my photos from social media as a precaution against deepfakes," read Korean-language text in an image shared on Bobaedream, a South Korean online forum, on October 14.
The image, which appeared to be taken from a media interview, featured a woman with a blurred face identified as Park Ah-rang. The post said she lived in Seoul's Hannam district.
In South Korean feminist circles, "Hannam" is also used to refer to male chauvinists in the East Asian country.
Text in the top left-hand corner of the image read: "I'm afraid of men" followed by "Tears".
The post -- which included a caption repeating a similar claim -- attracted more than 160,000 views and hundreds of comments.
The image quickly spread to other social media platforms, such as X and Thread, as well as South Korean online forums including DC Inside, Quasar Zone, Ppompu, 386dx.com, Itoland, Bada, Coinpan and Naver Cafe.
It circulated after South Korean authorities uncovered scores of chatrooms on the Telegram messaging app in late August sharing videos and images showing sexual abuse made with generative AI (archived link).
According to Yonhap News Agency, 474 people have been arrested in 2024 as of October 14 as part of the crackdown (archived link).
Some users appeared to believe the image was taken from a genuine media interview, leaving hostile and misogynistic comments on the post.
AFP found no trace of the image used in news reports, and its low quality suggested it was not from an official media source.
It was first posted by an Instagram user with the handle "lildoge_mars" on October 10.
It was accompanied by the caption "This is a virtual image created with AI" as shown in the screenshot below (archived link):
The user has regularly shared AI-generated, often satirical content on Instagram and YouTube, with posts typically garnering hundreds of thousands of views (archived here).
While his Instagram account appears to have been removed, a post with a similar chyron to that in the false post remains visible on his YouTube account, as shown below (archived link):
In the false posts, the woman's pinching hand gesture resembles one once used by a defunct South Korean feminist group to ridicule the size of male genitals (archived link).