Sexual Deepfakes Face First Crackdown; Nagoya Teacher Referred to Prosecutors, Indicted

The Yomiuri Shimbun

19:47 JST, December 5, 2025

NAGOYA — A male elementary school teacher in Nagoya has been referred to prosecutors for allegedly possessing obscene images of children created using generative artificial intelligence, it has been learned.

The man was indicted on Friday.

The 34-year-old teacher is one of seven elementary and junior high school teachers arrested by the Aichi prefectural police for sharing secretly taken images of girls changing clothes and other materials in a group chat on social media.

According to the indictment, the man is suspected of possessing AI-produced sexually explicit images of female students, at his home in Nagoya in March.

According to the prefectural police, the man sent images of two real children to another person to create sexually explicit images using generative AI. The real children’s images had been stored at the school where he worked.

The possession and production of sexual images of children is regulated by the child prostitution and child pornography prevention law, but because this law is designed to target real children, it has been considered difficult to apply to sexual deepfakes created with generative AI.

The prefectural police determined that the obscene images constituted child pornography because the victim was identifiable from the deepfake image.

This is the first crackdown on sexual deepfakes under the law.