Asia Tech Wire (Oct 10) -- The South Korean government on Thursday voted to amend the Sexual Violence Punishment Act, which deals with crimes involving sexually explicit deepfakes.

According to the amendment, a person who possesses, acquires, keeps or views sexually explicit deepfake images and videos can be sentenced to up to three years in prison or a fine of 30 million won.

And the penalty for editing or distributing sexually explicit deepfakes was raised from the previous imprisonment of up to five years to imprisonment of up to seven years.

If there is a profit motive, the penalty will be increased from less than seven years to more than three years.

In addition, the use of sexually explicit deepfakes to intimidate is punishable by more than one year's imprisonment.

The amendment comes at a time when a number of vicious AI face-swapping crimes in South Korea have come to light.

In May, an investigative report by Yonhap News Agency found dozens of chat rooms on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, where Korean male users shared photos of ordinary women and swapped their faces into pornographic productions using deep-fake software.

And in August, hundreds of similar Telegram chat rooms were exposed, expanding to include schoolgirls, teachers and soldiers, with the largest known chat room having more than 220,000 members.

South Korean police announced in early September that they had opened a pre-filing investigation into Telegram's alleged indulgence in sexually explicit deepfakes.