December 30, 2024
TOKYO – Websites that allow users create sexually explicit deepfake images using generative AI received more than 18 million visits from Japan over a year, a survey by The Yomiuri Shimbun has found.
That makes Japan the third-largest country in the world for such traffic after the United States and India.
It is becoming increasingly common both in Japan and abroad for people to create explicit deepfakes of others and then spread the images via social media, and websites that let users create such images are believed to play a major role in the problem. One expert has called for rules and regulations to prevent harm in Japan.
In the survey, The Yomiuri Shimbun identified 41 websites that say they let users create fake sexual images. Visits to the sites were also examined by country for the year from December 2023 to November 2024, using a tool provided by digital analysis firm Similarweb Ltd.
The United States saw the most traffic at about 59.73 million visits, followed by India at around 24.57 million visits, Japan at about 18.43 million visits, Russia at about 17.59 million visits and Germany at around 16.86 million visits.
From Japan, about 410,000 people accessed the websites each month on average, with 80% of users visiting via a smartphone.
The websites allow users to upload images of people and alter the images to remove people’s clothes. Instructions on the websites are mostly given in English and Russian, with some sites offering Japanese. More than half the websites are believed to have been launched this year.
With the rise of these sites, there has been a similar rise in the creation of fake and unauthorized images, as well as videos, and the sharing of this content online. There were confirmed to be 95,820 deepfake videos online in 2023, or 5.5 times more videos than in 2019, and 98% of these were sexual videos, according to a survey by U.S. security firm Security Hero. As deepfakes have become more common, other countries have moved to draft new laws.
“To prevent people from easily creating fake sexual images, Japan also needs to consider laws and regulations, as well as provide instruction on information literacy to keep people from making such harmful images,” said Ichiro Sato, a professor specializing in information science at the National Institute of Informatics.