South Korea is working to close a legal loophole that allowed people sharing AI-generated pornography featuring fictional personas to go scot-free. The move by lawmakers came after a court in Goyang, Gyeonggi province, acquitted a man accused of distributing deepfake images of nude women in a Telegram chat room. Despite prosecutors presenting the evidence under a law carrying up to seven years in prison or a maximum fine of 50 million won (US$35,341), a judge last August ruled that the victims were virtual, not human. That verdict prompted representative Huh Young and nine other lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea to propose a bill criminalising the creation, distribution and possession of sexually explicit material made using artificial intelligence, even when it does not depict a real person. “However, the technology has also been misused to produce and distribute manipulated sexual content that causes sexual humiliation or disgust, which is emerging as a serious social problem.”