How AI Is Remaking K-Entertainment
Where the K-wave meets AI: Korea’s entertainment industry becomes a real-time testbed for augmented creativity
On November 21 & 22, 2025, a “virtual” boy band pulled off the unthinkable: selling out Seoul’s Gocheok Sky Dome, K-pop’s arena pinnacle, for two nights straight. PLAVE drew 37,000 screaming fans, proving that pixels can pack arenas just like BTS.
For two decades, Korean soft power has moved on two tracks: K-pop anthems and endlessly bingeable K-dramas. The world sang along to “Gangnam Style,” BTS, and Blackpink, and devoured series from ‘Crash Landing on You’ to ‘Squid Game’, as Seoul studios turned local culture into a global habit.
Now a third layer is snapping into place: AI-assisted entertainment. Algorithms are starting to act like extra staff, helping teams draft visuals faster, test concepts earlier, and deliver content at a pace that would have been painfully slow even a few years ago. In Korea, AI is being absorbed into an already industrialized entertainment system, changing how culture is produced, tested, and scaled.
Korea’s advantage here is structural. Its entertainment industry is already an export-oriented machine built on disciplined training systems, tightly managed IP, and data-driven iteration. Rather than being disrupted, the industry is folding AI into its operating model, using it to compress workflows and move expensive decisions earlier, when they are cheaper to change.
That puts Korea on a slightly different track from other major markets. The conversation in the U.S. is still heavily shaped by credit, consent, and labor questions. Japan is moving more cautiously, often in narrower niches. China is scaling fast, top-down. Korea, meanwhile, is landing somewhere in the middle: keep creators front and center, but weave AI into the day-to-day of how content gets made, tested, and released. In other words, Korea is arguably one of the world’s most active laboratories for AI-driven entertainment.
Virtual Idols Go Mainstream
PLAVE’s success is a good example. It is a five-member virtual boy band, but the performances come from real human performers, translated into 3D avatars through real-time motion capture. The result is a hybrid model: a familiar idol experience for fans, delivered through a digital format that can be refined and scaled faster than traditional production cycles.
Korea has a built-in advantage here. Its trainee system produces huge amounts of structured performance data that AI can learn from, including vocal takes, choreography drills, rehearsal videos, and detailed evaluations. Agencies are already using AI to mock up vocals, preview dance routines, and fine-tune digital members before committing to expensive physical production. The result is a different pre-debut equation: more testing, less guesswork, and earlier iteration. In a system where debuts are expensive and failure is public, that matters.
With motion-capture rigs, 3D character production, and story-led digital content, PLAVE can release music, stream, and engage fans in a format that is easier to update and optimize over time. And the fandom still looks familiar: buying physical albums, organizing events, and following the “members” across platforms as if nothing fundamental has changed.
PLAVE is not a one-off. Across 2024 and 2025, MAVE: showed that fully virtual girl groups can sustain multi-year activity. Hybrid experiments like SUPERKIND have also used generative tools to iterate concepts early and test digital member ideas before committing to a debut.
Korea’s First AI-Assisted Feature Film
The same pattern is now unfolding at the movies. ‘Run to the West’ opened in Korean theaters in October this year and is being billed as the country’s first feature-length AI-assisted film.
Co-directed by filmmaker Kang Yoon-sung and AI developer Kwon Han-seul, the film used AI across pre-production, from pre-visualization and concept art to scene blocking and early VFX prototyping. It also used AI instead of traditional CGI and VFX for creature designs, action sequences, and even a full-scale car explosion, while filming only the live-action shots that were absolutely necessary.
The point was not creative automation. It was operational compression: pulling expensive decisions forward, when changes are cheaper. Kang said scenes that once took four to five months of CG work were sometimes completed in hours. Adding that post-production was cut to three to four months instead of the year-long timeline common for effects-heavy films, with fewer green-screen filming days needed for the actors - freeing them up for other projects.
Studios are watching because Korean productions run on tight schedules and lean budgets, while streamers still demand ambitious, effects-heavy storytelling. When VFX planning starts late or shifts midstream, costs rise and timelines slip. AI helps by generating usable drafts early, so teams can lock choices before the most expensive work begins. That is why mid-sized studios and OTT teams are already testing AI for storyboards, look development, and early VFX drafts.
But like a lot of new tech experiments, ‘Run to the West’ wasn’t universally celebrated as a breakthrough. There were mixed reactions after release, including criticism that the quality was “too soon,” a concern the directors acknowledged.
Practical limitations surfaced too: certain creature-movement details and bright scenes still needed retouching, and Kang pointed to areas where AI still struggles with fine detail.
That tension is now becoming part of the industry’s mainstream conversation. Even Bong Joon-ho, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Parasite and the director of Mickey 17, has described AI as both fear-inducing and impossible to ignore. Speaking at the Marrakech International Film Festival, he joked he would “organize a military squad” to destroy AI, while also crediting it for pushing people to seriously consider what only humans can do.
The Platforms Powering the New K-Wave
As Korean studios experiment with AI-native formats, the bottleneck shifts from making content to getting it discovered. In short-form especially, distribution is not downstream from creation. It is the feedback loop that determines what gets surfaced, replayed, and abandoned, and that loop shapes what gets written and produced next.
BytePlus, ByteDance’s enterprise tech arm, has become part of that loop for K-content in Southeast Asia. Between 2024 and 2025, BytePlus has started appearing behind the scenes of short-form K-content apps, particularly through personalization and video-effects tooling.
One example is Soonshot, a short-form international K-drama app backed by Korean comedian-producer Lee Kyung-kyu. It serves one-to-two-minute episodes and uses BytePlus infrastructure to tailor what viewers see. Reporting says it crossed 110,000 users globally within its first few months.
This matters because Southeast Asia is one of the fastest-growing markets for K-pop, K-dramas, and virtual idols, and it is increasingly where new formats are tested at scale. For AI-assisted entertainment, platform infrastructure is not just distribution. It is the mechanism that turns audience behavior into production signals.
Korea’s National Bet on AI-Native Content
And now the state is stepping in to make this capability reusable. In October 2025, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) launched the K‑Content AI Innovation Project, a ₩10 billion (about US$7.3 million) programme positioning The Pinkfong Company, the team behind ‘Baby Shark’, at the center of a national push to fuse AI with cultural exports.
KOCCA has described it as its biggest single-project allocation under its support programs, with the goal of building a “next-generation content industry ecosystem” where AI supports everything from storytelling and animation to immersive media and reusable IP pipelines, spanning formats from kids’ franchises to webtoons.
Pinkfong will lead development of what is billed as Korea’s first global AI‑powered immersive exhibition, an interactive space where digital characters respond in real time to visitors’ movements, facial expressions and voice – combining large language models, speech‑to‑text, text‑to‑speech and computer vision.
Why Seoul Is Becoming a Testbed for Global Entertainment
Korea’s rapid absorption of AI into entertainment brings the hard questions forward. When content is optimized for feeds and retention, novelty can give way to what performs. AI-assisted pipelines also blur authorship, credit, and ownership, while the debate over training data and IP remains unsettled. The longer-term test is emotional: whether avatar-led fandom can sustain trust and immersion over time.
But Korea has one advantage most markets do not. It is running many experiments across formats with near-instant audience feedback, from virtual idols and film workflows to webtoons, kids’ IP, animation, and short-form video. That density of iteration makes Korea a practical testbed for what holds up and what fails.
The rest of the world is watching. China is scaling its AI-content infrastructure. Japan is adopting selectively. Southeast Asian platforms and Western streamers are tracking which Korean models can be repeated commercially.
Because Korea is small, export-driven, and brutally feedback-oriented, it will discover the limits of AI-augmented entertainment sooner than larger markets. What builds trust, what breaks immersion, and what audiences quietly reject will likely be tested in Seoul first, before they become global lessons.