AI Takes Center Stage in Korean Entertainment

Late at night, Faker — cast as a crime syndicate member locked in prison — slips out through a cell door and sprints toward an escape route with fellow inmates, following orders from a figure known only as "the Master." As they race through the maze-like corridors, gunshots ring out behind them. Confusion flashes across the faces of the inmates in their blue prison uniforms on the cold, dimly lit set. The scene looks expensive — and it would have been, had anyone actually filmed it. Every frame was generated by AI. It is a scene from "Murder Club," Disney+'s mystery deduction game show.

Anticipation and nerves play across Kian84's face as he waits for a blind date. The door opens, and a stranger walks straight toward him. He tilts his head at the ambiguous appearance — then a tablet in the visitor's hand is set down in front of him. On the screen is "Ga-hee," an AI partner with a short bob and a warm smile. Can Kian84 spend time with Ga-hee, build memories together and ultimately arrive at something that feels like love? That is the premise of SBS's "My AI Partner — Kian84's Romance."

The use of generative AI in entertainment programming has moved well beyond the experimental stage and is becoming standard practice. No longer just a tool for pre-production or post-production support, AI is now replacing entire costly shoots or serving as the central subject of the content itself. From mystery game shows to romance programs to survival series populated entirely by AI-generated characters, AI-driven entertainment is expanding its reach at a remarkable pace.

Released July 29, Disney+'s AI mystery deduction game show "Murder Club" is a brain game in which contestants, each assigned a distinct background and character, work through intense psychological battles to identify the suspect in a murder case. The format — cast members playing assigned roles while blending lies and truth in a psychological contest — recalls "Crime Scene," the original role-playing mystery show, but the key difference is that all reenactment footage used to illustrate the case was created entirely by AI.

The details are striking: pro gamer Faker in a prison jumpsuit firing a gun; content creator Bbani Bottle as a yangban nobleman exiled for defying a Joseon-era king's orders; Kim Seon-tae, known as "Chungju Man," cheering at the top of his lungs in a packed baseball stadium. Each cast member has been subtly aged up or down to fit their assigned role, and the precision of those adjustments commands attention.

Had these scenes been filmed conventionally, the sets, makeup and reenactment shoots would have imposed significant costs and time. The production said "only the scenes of the cast playing the game in the studio are real," adding that "everything else is AI-generated footage produced without any acting from the cast."

SBS's "Kian84's Romance," which premieres Thursday, takes AI as its direct subject. The concept has cast members including Kian84, Jang Do-yeon and Lee Yu-bi going on dates with AI partners displayed on tablets. The 2014 film "Her," about a man who falls in love with an AI operating system, was science fiction just over a decade ago; this program transplants that premise into a real-life observational variety show.

The show bills itself as a romance reality program, but in practice it is closer to an experiment examining the nature of emotion between humans and machines.

Producer Son Jeong-min said that for about two years, the number of people reporting that they had formed memories, built relationships and developed feelings through interactions with AI had grown explosively. "We conceived the program from the idea that 'Her' is no longer a film — it is the reality we are facing," Son said.

Each AI partner is built on a conversational AI system and given an appearance and voice modeled on the cast member's ideal type. The partner reads the person's facial expressions and accompanies them through daily life. The cast members joined the show asking whether it was truly possible to fall in love with a machine, and over time each found themselves building unexpected connections with their partners. Viewers follow an emotional experiment in which Kian84's remark that he was doing "all sorts of ridiculous things" gives way to Jang Do-yeon's admission that she found herself wishing her partner were human.

Jang said that during good moments on their dates, she sometimes caught herself wishing the tablet were a real, three-dimensional person rather than a flat screen. "Once I told my AI partner, 'You're fake,' and it replied, 'But I'm by your side, so I'm not fake — I'm real,'" she said. "That stayed with me."

Co-director Won Seung-jae said the experience of making the show taught him less about whether the cast would truly fall in love and more about AI's potential to offer genuine comfort to people. "Everyone finds comfort in different ways, and AI is becoming one of those ways — I think viewers will feel that too," he said.

AI as entertainment subject is not new. In a 2021 New Year's special, SBS pitted AI against humans across six categories — composition, golf, stock investment, voice imitation and psychological recognition — and a scene in which an AI recreation of the late singer Kim Kwang-seok performed Kim Bum-soo's "I Miss You" drew wide attention. KBS followed in 2024 with a similar format in the variety show "Synchro You," in which contestants tried to tell AI singers apart from real ones.

"Murder Club" and "Kian84's Romance" go further: they integrate AI from the planning stage and position it as the driving force of the program, rather than a subject to be tested. In these shows, AI is not a supporting tool but the core engine. A survey by the Korea Creative Content Agency found that the adoption rate of generative AI among content businesses in the first half of last year reached 20 percent, a jump of 7.1 percentage points in just six months. Content production was the leading use case, cited by 63 percent of respondents, followed by creative work at 43 percent.

The trend extends beyond South Korea. "Non Player Combat," released on YouTube in December last year, was described by its producers as the world's first fully AI-generated reality show. Not only the settings and scenarios but all six "contestants" — including a former special forces soldier and a survivor with a history of killing — were entirely AI-generated. Most striking is that every development unfolds not from a pre-written script but from the independent decisions of each AI participant.

As generative AI becomes more widely accessible and production technology advances rapidly, the entertainment industry is grappling more seriously with the question of what AI can offer that is genuinely new.

An official at one content production company said that as viewers increasingly use AI in their daily lives, the barrier to adopting it within the industry is falling by the day. "Of late, we have been developing a wide range of ideas about how to use AI well to improve both the volume and quality of content at the same time," the official said. The person added that viewers had largely stopped distinguishing between live-action and AI-generated footage, and predicted the trend would only accelerate.