From Short-Form to Epic Sageuk, AI Is Rewriting Korea's Content Playbook

"AI is the path that can save Korea's content industry."

Jung Geun-wook, chief executive of KT Studio Genie — the production house behind "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" and other dramas — doubled down on that conviction in a recent interview, insisting that AI "is not simply a passing technology trend." The studio, which has expanded from dramas and short-form content into film production, has gone so far as to establish a dedicated in-house team that creates AI video, signaling an all-in bet on the technology.

With AI now firmly mainstream, Jung argues the technology is no longer optional for any company trying to achieve both survival and growth at the same time.

The arrival of the AI era is rapidly reshaping the content industry's entire ecosystem. AI-model advertisements have become a routine fixture on television, the fast-growing short-form drama market is being reorganized around AI technology by the day, and AI is steadily expanding its presence in traditional production — dramas and films — embedding itself ever more deeply into everyday life.

It is no exaggeration to say that AI has become an indispensable tool in content production. A Korea Creative Content Agency survey of 2,500 content businesses found that the adoption rate of generative AI in the broadcasting and video sector reached 31.9 percent in the fourth quarter of last year — up from 3.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024, a more than tenfold increase in just one year.

Particularly striking was the production stage: 87 percent of respondents said they use generative AI during content creation, a rate well above other industries.

"Thinking about how to use AI during production has become the natural order of things," said an official at one drama production company. "The question is no longer whether to use AI, but how to use it and how well."

The distance between AI and the general public is closing at an unprecedented pace. "Agent Kim Reactivated," the SBS drama series that wrapped last month, drew widespread attention for a three-minute action sequence featuring So Ji-sub that was produced entirely with AI — the first time a sequence of that length in a domestic commercial drama has been completed wholly through the technology.

Broadcasters and production companies are pushing well beyond a three-minute proof of concept. AI has long been standard in pre-production work such as storyboarding and in post-production tasks such as computer graphics. Now it is rapidly moving into the production stage itself, replacing actual filming and reaching audiences in an ever-wider range of forms.

One example came in episode 11 of the Tving original drama "The Legend of Kitchen Soldier," which ended its run in June. A scene in which lead character Kang Seong-jae, played by Park Ji-hoon, cooks with gochujang was filmed using an unbranded container, then AI was used in post-production to seamlessly overlay a specific branded product — a technique known as virtual product placement, or VPPL. The key achievement was not merely swapping one product for another, but replicating the precise movement and angle of the actor's hand so convincingly that the result was indistinguishable from a live-action shoot.

"Great King Munmu," a KBS epic Sageuk drama scheduled to air in November, will be the first historical drama to make full-scale use of AI. The broadcaster plans to apply the technology to crowd scenes in large-scale war sequences, to recreate shots that would be dangerous or impractical to film, and to render fire sequences. KBS said it aims to improve on-set safety and production efficiency while achieving a level of realism and visual polish in large-scale scenes that conventional production methods could not deliver.

Beyond using AI for backgrounds and visual effects — as in "Agent Kim Reactivated" — productions in which specific sequences or entire works are generated by AI are expected to grow. KT Studio Genie plans to release AI-assisted works before the end of this year, and is preparing sequences that use AI for everything, including the actors themselves. Those works are expected to reach viewers across multiple channels, including television and OTT platforms.

China has already moved further down this road. Anhui Satellite TV, a regional broadcaster, began airing the fully AI-generated historical drama "Taohua Tan Ji" late last month, generating considerable buzz. The 20-episode series runs about 10 minutes per episode, and while critical opinion on its craft and polish is divided, the significance lies in the fact that a work created entirely by AI has entered the mainstream broadcast system.

China's Economic Daily said in a recent commentary that the scheduling decision, though it might appear to be a minor programming adjustment, "in fact marks the opening act of 'AI plus video' entering the mainstream of mass media."

South Korea has also seen fully AI-produced video content reach television audiences. EBS aired what it billed as the country's first 100 percent AI drama on a terrestrial broadcaster — "Drama AI: Revival Class" — which used AI digital technology to reconstruct historical figures and render the messages they might have left had they sat before a camera.

The premiere episode, "Ahn Jung-geun, Is the Future Peaceful?," which aired in April, opens with the independence activist turning on a camera inside Lushun Prison in 1910 and introducing himself in a measured tone: "I am Ahn Jung-geun, chief of staff of the Korean Righteous Army." The AI-rendered record of Ahn — imprisoned at Lushun and sentenced to death following the Harbin assassination — speaking across time to the future drew considerable attention from viewers.

The fast-growing short-form drama market is embracing AI even more aggressively, rewriting the genre's production grammar in the process. In the short-form space, AI has already moved past the experimental stage and into full commercialization.

China, which leads the global short-form market, is also driving AI adoption. According to an MIT Technology Review analysis, as of January this year, roughly 470 AI-generated short-form dramas were being produced per day in China alone.

South Korea's short-form drama market is moving quickly to keep pace. The short-form drama platform Biglu began producing AI-assisted short-form dramas in earnest in July last year, and in the most recent month, AI works accounted for roughly 40 to 50 percent of newly launched titles. Across its entire catalog, AI-produced short-form dramas make up 15 percent of all content.

Audience response has been positive. Looking at key regional markets, AI titles account for 80 percent of Biglu's top-ranked short-form dramas in the United States, 30 percent in South Korea, 20 percent in Japan, and 70 percent in the Middle East and North Africa.

Lee So-dam, Biglu's head of global content, said that as AI technology advances rapidly, "the naturalness of video, character consistency and directorial polish are all improving significantly." She added that the platform has confirmed "what matters to users is ultimately an entertaining plot — not the production method itself."

A short-form drama that incorporated AI technology also made a strong impression at "Director's Arena," a short-form drama competition on ENA that ended in July. The AI-assisted entry "Snakes and Ladders" — a blend of school drama and suspense thriller that layered AI-generated virtual spaces and settings over the actors' performances — advanced to the final round. It stood as a prime example of how AI can enable a budget-constrained short-form production to expand its genre ambitions.

Han Su-ji, the director of "Snakes and Ladders," said using AI "is something that can no longer be refused," adding that her goal through the project was "to become a director who can quickly attempt and handle work in line with the advancement of AI technology."

"I'm the Real Third-Generation Chaebol!," released in late July and ranked No. 1 in the Korean-language category on the short-form drama platform Reelshort, similarly replaced all backgrounds — the school setting and surrounding students — with AI-generated imagery, keeping only the performances of the lead actors.

Jung, the KT Studio Genie chief executive, said generating backgrounds with AI can save tens of millions of won that would otherwise go toward location costs. "Cost savings are profit," he said, adding that a further advantage is the ability to distribute works globally using AI for subtitling and translation, "without the burden of doing that manually."

Whether AI is a universal solution for cutting production costs is a question the industry answers with less unanimity. Some voices point out that the cost of hiring specialized AI talent and deploying the technology is far from trivial at this stage.

Beyond costs, fully AI-generated content — spanning the entire pipeline from pre-production to post-production — faces a thicket of unresolved rights issues before it can enter the mainstream in earnest. These include actors' rights to their own likeness and screenwriters' copyright, among other overlapping claims. The industry is united in calling for clear AI copyright standards to be established.

Kim Tae-hwan, chief executive of AI entertainment-technology firm Creative Meot, told a recent Korea Creative Content Agency roundtable that "the absence of clear standards on copyright, likeness rights and the similarity of generative AI outputs is the single greatest source of uncertainty for commercialization in the new-technology and AI content sector," and urged the government to develop standardized guidelines.

In response, Korea Creative Content Agency President Kim Yun-ji said that as AI technology advances rapidly, "the way content is produced and the demands of the industry are also changing fast," and pledged to "review support measures — including research into regulation and institutional frameworks, and the cultivation of AI talent — to underpin the growth of the content industry."