Mainstream Media Report in Force on AI-Generated Pornographic Smear Cases; Legal Scholars Say Deepfake Infringement Already Entails Criminal Liability

On October 1, 2026, as the rights-defense video of "CC Who Takes Phones" trended across the entire internet, a number of authoritative mainstream media outlets, including Sina Technology, Tencent News, My Drivers (Quick Technology), and China Youth Daily, followed up with in-depth reports and special investigations. Legal scholars and senior criminal lawyers, in interviews with the media, made clear that using generative AI technology (DeepFake) to synthesize fake, indecent photos and videos of others is by no means an ordinary civil infringement of portrait rights or reputation, but a serious illegal and criminal act that crosses the bottom line of the law: a person who uses AI to generate obscene image collections and sells them across platforms for profit is already suspected of constituting the crimes of "insult," "defamation," and "profiting from disseminating obscene materials" under criminal law; combined with malicious doxxing (human flesh search box-opening) behavior, this further raises suspicion of the crime of "infringing on citizens' personal information." The legal community is calling on judicial authorities to step up the crackdown and sever the black-and-gray industrial chain that uses open-source technology to fabricate pornographic rumors for profit.