Recently, it has been observed by ‘The Yomiuri Shimbun’ that those websites that allow users to make sexually explicit deepfake images through generative AI gained 18 million visits from Japan within one year. In other words, Japan is considered as the third-largest country next to the United States and India in terms of visiting such sites, according to the reports of ‘The Star’.
The increasing number of explicit deepfakes both in Japan and worldwide has been a problem. Many have been created and shared through social media. Sites that enable the creation of deepfake content have contributed to the spread of this problem.
Experts have sounded alarms and called for regulation to curb the damage that deepfake technology may cause. According to ‘The Star’, professor at National Institute of Informatics Ichiro Sato said that “laws and greater information literacy” are needed to address this issue.
The survey detected 41 web sites where fake sexual images may be created. It indicates that between December 2023 and November 2024, these websites had a big number of visits. Its biggest traffic source was the United States with 59.73 million visits, followed by India with 24.57 million visits, then Japan with 18.43 million visits. Russia had 17.59 million visits and Germany had 16.86 million visits.
On average, around 410,000 people from Japan access these sites every month. About 80% use smartphones. On these websites, users can upload images and use them to create explicit content. It has instructions in more than a few languages including English, Russian, and a few words in Japanese.
The survey also found that more than half of these sites were launched in 2024, which is at a time when deepfake creations and online sharing surged. According to a report from U.S. cybersecurity firm Security Hero, it estimated that 95,820 deepfake videos had surfaced online in 2023, five and a half times more than the numbers in 2019. Of these, 98% were sexually explicit.
Many countries are working on new laws that would combat the problem. For instance, Professor Sato, who specializes in information science, urged Japan to follow suit by introducing legislation and promoting better information literacy to prevent the creation and distribution of harmful deepfake images.
