“All I could think about, was that I’d be better off dead.” This was what Breeze Liu shared with the media after finding AI-generated pornography of herself online, and the same thought could be shared by thousands of other women across the globe suffering from fabricated sexual images and videos intended for defamation. Is technology inherently biased, inherently misogynistic, inherently inflictive of shame, humiliation, and harm? When AI and technology are repurposed for not the benefit of humanity’s scientific progress but rather slander and the objectification and sexualization of women, all evidence points towards the underlying crisis driving other inequalities in the female population: the embedded culture of misogyny in society. As technology progresses rapidly while a society’s human rights measures and efforts toward equity and inclusion lag behind, humanity faces grave consequences that challenge our current understanding of social order and ethics. Thus, society as a whole is collectively accountable when mothers, daughters, female soldiers, teachers, students, and countless other women have their basic rights violated by misconduct through AI and technology.
Of 95,820 deepfake pornography published online, more than half of such content featured South Korean female celebrities and public figures (Sungshin Bae, September 24, 2024). The reason behind the focused target towards Korean women ultimately falls back to the topic of traditional misogyny that has been brought back to the people’s attention with the deepfake crisis as a wake-up call for equality and human rights. The deeply rooted culture of misogyny is seated in multiple aspects, including social norms in the economy, workplace, and popular media, despite the increasing protests and female rights activism.
As of 2023, South Korea ranked as one of the top countries with the largest gender wage gap, with South Korean women earning only 70.7% of what men earn on average (OECD 2022a). The large gender wage gap is reflective of two key issues connected to the central theme of imposed inferiority on women: enforced gender roles and workplace discrimination. Traditionally, women are expected to play more domestic roles, and men are expected to attend businesses and act as the financial backbone within family relationships. Even though women have made significant progress in amplifying their voices in professional fields and in the workplace, South Korea’s ingrained culture of gender roles has made opportunities more restrictive and exclusive to female workers. In fact, the hoju system, the traditional Korean system that legally recognizes only a male member as the head of a household, lived until only twenty years ago, when it was finally invalidated in 2005 (Morley 2024). Other family members are only defined by their relationship to the legal head, thus highlighting the subordinate social status of women as they are traditionally defined as pieces subservient to their fathers or husbands rather than as independent individuals themselves. This rooted stereotype enforces unnecessary obstacles for women when they face career choices and aspirations. Their society urges them to prioritize their “domestic roles” and pursue a more stereotypically fitting job, such as relatively lower-paying healthcare positions, over a more energetically demanding yet highly rewarding career in finance. For all of the above reasons, a global economic slowdown has triggered Korean men to project their frustration onto women. Because of the rising female voices and the awareness of empowerment for women, more and more Korean women have started to compete with men for available occupations. The stark contrast between Korean men’s current earnings and struggles in the workplace and the simple lives of men from the previous generations aroused collective discontent from young men, and that same discontent could be redirected toward their female competitors (Steger 2016). The low participation of women in decision-making roles and the large thirty-one percent gender wage gap nonetheless emphasize the extreme gender inequality in South Korea and set the backdrop for digital sex crimes against the female population (Barr 2024). In a workforce environment where women in elite occupations are rare, actively working women are still frequently targeted to normalized workplace harassment. This means that even on professional grounds, women are not taken seriously and are still viewed as vulnerable and often obliged to serve to the pleasure of men. The negative work culture in South Korea thereby sets an undertone for tolerated sexual offences and the rising number of digital sex crimes, calling attention to AI misuse and ethics. But why are South Korean women so easily treated as a target to which men can unleash their frustrations and emotions without restraint? Another leading factor to South Korea’s misogyny lies in the culture of sexualizing women in one of the greatest influencing powers in the modern day: the media.
In the face of rapid technological advancements, artificial intelligence is almost meticulously interwoven into our daily lives. The crisis of deepfakes and technology misuse is ultimately foreshadowed by the embedded culture of women being objectified and sexualized in South Korea’s popular media. In the age of digital media, the South Korean idol industry takes a leading role in sexualizing women with the catering of female K-POP groups to the male gaze. Reaching a soaring height of approximately eleven trillion South Korean won worth of revenue in 2022, K-POP is undoubtedly a significant economic driver in South Korea’s market (AFM Redaktion 2024). The trend of sexually implicit music videos gaining more attention and popularity in South Korea’s male-dominated society means companies are taking advantage of this tendency to increase “sexually provocative” content in K-POP music videos in order to gain monetary profits. Although this trend does not necessarily involve explicit sexual scenes, many are sexually suggestive and even include minors who debuted under the age of eighteen. The repetitive appearance of sexual exploitation in music, whether revealing clothing or inappropriate lyrics and choreography, creates the environment for normalizing infantilized and sexually objectified women and K-POP female idols to the male gaze (‘The Shocking Reality of K-Pop: Sexualization’ 2018). The tolerance of deeply ingrained sexual exploitation against women can shape how younger generations perceive women. When hypersexualization becomes normalized, it can distort their understanding of women’s roles in society, potentially leading to misogyny and encouraging an objectified view of women. By emphasizing the sexualization of female idols, their performance is reduced from an expression of art and music to the patriarchal product as an object to the, often, male audience. Given the widespread objectified image of female K-POP idols, it isn’t so surprising to learn that fifty-three percent of victims targeted by deepfake pornography consisted of South Korean singers and actresses. In the popular culture where celebrities are molded to be subservient and conform to the ideal and stereotypical hyper-feminine role, deepfake and artificial intelligence are only tools wielded by those whose intentions were already shaped by the misogynistic culture long before deepfake even existed.
Technology is neutral. The workforce is neutral. The pursuit of music and dreams? Neutral, neutral, neutral. What makes these things a weapon for harm is society and the values it instills. Technology embodies the values it has been fed by the society from which it developed: shaped by human minds, controlled by human hands. In the case of South Korea, the often misogynistic culture has cultivated the exact ingredients for digital sexual offences, where the nature of its technology is shaped to fit its mold– even a mold that objectifies and sexualizes women. To address the debate of AI ethics and technology causing harm, it is crucial to reach a collective understanding of how technology is neutral and how harm is inflicted by the negative cultures of a society. It is indeed a shared responsibility between developers, companies, and regulators to ensure ethical considerations are prioritized and that the disadvantaged are properly protected. However, the greater concept of accountability is nonetheless assigned to our society as a whole. We must promote correct values reinforcing equity and inclusion through every stage of education, and we must ensure discrimination, namely misogyny, is no longer fuelled by distorted perspectives and information under the influence of media during the current “digital” age.
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