Rusydi Farhan

Topic: Criminalising AI Harms in ASEAN
How can ASEAN and its member states implement effective accountability for malicious AI-enabled harms, without producing a chilling effect on innovation?

Objective: AI policy initiatives around the world are currently working themselves through the legalisation processes. This project should attempt to analyse different approaches towards AI policy globally, identifying their proposed legal consequences for different types of violations, and assess their mechanisms of corrective action. The project should also consider what are potential failure modes where the legal instruments do not achieve their stated societal goals. 

The exponential growth of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in Southeast Asia has produced both unprecedented economic opportunities and novel categories of digital harm. The region’s digital economy is projected to reach USD 1 trillion by 2030, having attracted substantial investment from global technology firms and businesses (WEF, 2023). Parallel with this growth, GenAI has been weaponised to perpetrate harms at scale, most notably through non-consensual deepfake pornography (NCDP). Various research indicates that the overwhelming majority of deepfake content online is pornographic, with women and children comprising the vast majority of victims, who are subjected to harassment, blackmail, and psychological abuse (Citron & Chesney, 2019). Beyond the harm to direct victims, NCDP erodes trust in visual media and the integrity of the information ecosystem more broadly.
The regulatory response to these harms has been fragmented. The Grok AI incident, in which the xAI system was exploited to generate ‘nudifier’ content from clothed images, illustrates this divergence (Watkins, 2026). The European Union (EU) initiated formal data protection investigations, while Malaysia and Indonesia responded through platform access restrictions and monitoring, revealing the absence of harmonised ASEAN-level governance standards (O’Regan, 2026). Sophisticated actors can take advantage of exploitable gaps created by the regulatory disparity across nations.