(ANN/JAPAN NEWS) – Generative AI-powered websites that enable users to create sexually explicit deepfake images have become a troubling enabler of online harm, with Japan ranking as the third-largest source of traffic globally, after the United States and India.
These platforms received over 18 million visits from Japan in just one year, according to a survey by The Japan News.
The ease of access to such tools has contributed to a growing issue: the creation and dissemination of explicit deepfake images targeting individuals, often shared widely on social media.
Experts warn that these websites play a significant role in the proliferation of harmful content, prompting calls for stricter regulations to mitigate the damage caused.
The survey identified 41 websites claiming to offer such services and, using digital analysis tools from Similarweb Ltd, analysed visits by country between December 2023 and November 2024. The findings highlight the urgent need for comprehensive measures to address this escalating problem.
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 per cent of these were sexual videos, according to a survey by US 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.
