GoKawiilSouth Korea will hold local elections on June 3, and for the first time will enforce two laws aiming to curb the use of AI deepfakes to support political campaigns. The big question is: will it be enough?
While not the most dramatic issue facing voters, deepfakes remain a problem for elections worldwide. In 2024, some New Hampshire voters received a robocall claiming to be from then-US President Joe Biden asking residents not to vote in the state primary. South Korea, meanwhile, has faced everything from fake videos of political candidates on social media to AI-generated television news reports and more.
Leading up to South Korea's presidential election next year, a video was widely shared which falsely showed President Lee Jae-myung ending his hunger strike. At the time, he was not only the election frontrunner but also the opposition party leader.
Deepfakes have been around for years, but their quality and access have increased alongside the sophistication of generative AI.
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Brian Long, CEO and co-founder of Adaptive Security, a firm that specializes in threat awareness training for things like phishing emails and deepfakes, tells Dark Reading that two years ago, generating a convincing deepfake required real technical skill.
"Today, consumer tools produce convincing audio, video, and synthetic text in minutes," he says.
Long says the June 3 elections will be the first real stress test of South Korea's full regulatory framework. Clear legal infrastructure, he says, allows investigators to act faster while giving platforms clearer obligations to remove violating content. The problem exists in the channels that regulators can't clearly reach.
"Deepfakes distributed through encrypted messaging apps, targeted SMS campaigns, and direct voice calls move faster than any fact-checker. By the time a platform removes a clip, it has already reached the people it was designed to reach," he says. "Laws address the supply side. Awareness addresses the demand side. Voters who approach political audio and video with the same skepticism they bring to a suspicious phone call are significantly harder to manipulate. Building that instinct at scale, before election season, is where most countries are still in early days."
South Korea: A Unique Deepfake Test Case
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