Judge Kwon So-young of the Seoul Northern District Court convicted the 30-year-old of habitually editing and distributing falsified sexual imagery under the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Sexual Crimes, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The first-instance ruling also ordered him to complete 40 hours of a sex offender treatment program and forfeited the seized material, Financial News reported. He was barred for five years from working at institutions serving children, teenagers or people with disabilities.

The student was enrolled in a doctoral program at a prestigious Seoul university. Over about six months from November 2025 he superimposed the victims' faces onto pornographic photographs and videos, the court found.

All seven were women attached to his graduate laboratory, according to the Korea Economic Daily. The files sat on his personal laptop and came to light only while he was moving other research data off the machine.

Investigators also recovered records of searches for ways to bypass the safety guardrails built into Grok, Herald Business reported. The chatbot is developed by Elon Musk's xAI.

"The defendant repeatedly edited, composited and manipulated images of victims who were students in the same university laboratory," Kwon said, according to Money Today.

South Korea has been contending with a wave of deepfake sex crimes since 2024, when sprawling Telegram groups trading manipulated images of female students and school staff were uncovered.

A Seoul court that October sentenced a Seoul National University graduate to 10 years for creating and distributing nearly 2,000 such images of women from his own alma mater, AFP reported. A lawyer for the victims called it the heaviest penalty handed down since deepfake production was criminalized in 2020.