A South Korean man found himself at the center of a controversial legal battle after criticizing the appearance of Plave, a K-pop boy band made up of five digital avatars. Digital models and influencers are all the rage online these days, with some of them raking in millions for their creators, but Plave isn’t your run-of-the-mill AI-generated K-pop group. This makes criticizing the group in an otherwise harmless post on X (Twitter) problematic, as one South Korean man recently learned. After posting a negative comment about the look of Plave’s members, the unidentified man was sued for 6.5 million won in compensation for each of the group’s members. “In the era of the metaverse, the avatar is more than a virtual image; it is a means of expression for the user, their identity, and their way of communicating with society,” the Korean court said in its verdict.