May 22, 2025
SEOUL – The Seoul Metropolitan Government announced Wednesday that it had developed South Korea’s first AI-powered system that automatically monitors, detects, reports and requests the removal of sexually exploitative content online within minutes.
The city government plans to introduce the AI tool, which it says will reduce the time required from initial monitoring to filing deletion requests to just six minutes.
Previously, the entire process took an average of almost three hours, as authorities had to manually locate illegal videos circulating on social media platforms, online communities and illicit websites, and then file deletion requests with the respective sites.
Since 2023, the city government has worked with the Seoul Institute to monitor sexually exploitative content on social media websites, online communities and the dark web with AI, but the system wasn’t able to do more than monitor.
However, the newly developed AI tool is able to generate a report of its findings, after which the system automatically drafts an email requesting that the website operators delete the content. The email and report are then checked by an official in charge before it is sent to the website operators.
Additionally, amid an increasing number of cases where sexually exploitative videos are uploaded to foreign servers, the city government added that it will also be able to monitor content posted overseas.
The email sent to website operators can also be drafted in up to seven languages, such as English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Vietnamese.
The city government’s support center for digital sex crime victims provides “one-stop support” for victims, as it helps not only to remove sexually exploitative content but also provides investigative and legal support, psychological therapy and medical assistance for the victims.
According to numbers provided by the city government, the center has received reports filed by up to 3,650 people between 2022 and March 2025 and has helped handle 64,677 cases.
The majority of the victims were in their teens and 20s, with a significant increase in digital sex crime victims among children and teenagers over the last few years. The center recorded as many as 50 such cases in 2022, a number that increased to 624 in 2024.