A South Korean man found himself at the center of a controversial legal battle after criticizing the appearance of  Plave, a K-pop boy band made up of five digital avatars.

Digital models and influencers are all the rage online these days, with some of them raking in millions for their creators, but Plave isn’t your run-of-the-mill AI-generated K-pop group. Yes, the five members – Yejun, Noah, Bamby, Eunho, and Hamin – are digitally rendered, but they are the rendering of five real-life artists’ performances using motion capture technology. This makes criticizing the group in an otherwise harmless post on X (Twitter) problematic, as one South Korean man recently learned. After posting a negative comment about the look of Plave’s members, the unidentified man was sued for 6.5 million won in compensation for each of the group’s members.