Korea's AI film boom is outrunning its copyright rules

Korea is making AI features faster than it is writing rules for them. Generative AI has pulled AI-made films close to live-action quality while the country still lacks settled rules for copyright, likeness rights and the people who perform, Korea JoongAng Daily reported on October 27. The industry's own read is blunter. The technology arrived first, and the framework has not caught up.

What Korea's AI film wave looks like

These are features now, not demo reels. "Steelay," a 90-minute sci-fi film made entirely with AI tools, reached theaters on October 14 after a six-month production, according to Korea JoongAng Daily's account of its press screening in Seoul. Co-producer Laon Company put the budget at less than 1 billion won ($743,000), and Ham Seul-gi, head of AI Know Studio, said 500 million to 600 million won of that went to generative AI tools. The team picked about 13,000 AI-generated clips for the final film and discarded more.

Earlier Korean AI features did not draw audiences. "I'm PoPo" sold 781 admissions and "Man in Hanbok" 640, both pulled from theaters less than two weeks after their May premieres, according to Korean Film Council data cited by the same article. For scale, the average commercial Korean film cost 8.36 billion won to produce in 2025, excluding marketing, by NICE Investors Service's estimate in that report.

The tooling is spreading through television as well. A Korea Creative Content Agency survey of 2,500 content businesses found generative AI adoption in the broadcasting and video sector at 31.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, up from 3.2 percent a year earlier, and 87 percent of respondents said they use generative AI during content creation, Herald Business reported.

What Korea's copyright rules actually say

The Korea Copyright Commission separates AI output from AI-assisted work. Its Guide to Copyright Registration for Generative AI-Assisted Works, published June 30, 2025 and planned with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, sets the test at human creative contribution. A generative AI output with no human contribution cannot be registered. A work that uses AI as a tool can be registered, and protection reaches only the human-made parts. The Korea Creative Content Agency's summary of the guide's cases makes the message explicit: AI is not the creator, and it is the human creative input that copyright covers.

Registration works as disclosure. Korea JoongAng Daily reports that director Kwon Han-sl's AI short "One More Pumpkin" (2024) is registered as a work created with AI assistance, and the commission's case list includes it alongside other accepted examples. The commission published English editions of the registration guide and a companion dispute prevention guide on November 3, 2025, per a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism release.

None of that settles the harder question. Korea JoongAng Daily reports that clear standards are still lacking when AI-generated content infringes someone else's rights, and that a registration reflects human contribution rather than proving a film is free of other people's work.

Where likeness rights stand

No Korean statute reviewed here settles who owns a synthetic performance or a generated face. The year's clearest test case involved actor Yeom Hye-ran. On March 31, her agency Ace Factory said an AI video that used her likeness had been posted on YouTube without permission and had since been made private and deleted, as reported by MK and Star News. The producers of the film, "The Meter Reader," had said they cleared her likeness, those outlets reported, while her agency said it had never agreed to the production. In a later interview with SBS Entertainment News, Yeom said she found out through the news and that the industry is shocked but has no real solutions.

Korea JoongAng Daily adds a second account. A user asked a Chinese AI video model for a Korean noir-style alley scene and got back a video showing the face of a recognizable Korean actor, the article says, and current Korean rules offer no way to regulate that case. The same article reports that ByteDance's Seedance video model drew a Hollywood backlash in February after generating composite action videos featuring real Hollywood stars, and that most generative video programs have since blocked requests naming a real person and uploads of real photographs.

Other countries have moved on the same problem. Japan's actor and voice actor groups issued guidelines on October 15 to protect voice rights after repeated cases of voices being generated without permission, per Korea JoongAng Daily, and the article notes the European Union has written safeguards against unauthorized AI training into law while lawsuits continue in the United States.

What the people making the films say

Lee Jung-hyun, an actor and director who judged an AI film competition on October 18, described the trade-off in one line to Korea JoongAng Daily: as a rookie short-film director she was thrilled because she thought she could cut production costs, and as an actor she was sad enough to wonder whether she should retire.

Director Min Kyu-dong, head of the Directors Guild of Korea, told the paper that Korea is in a blind spot the law has not caught up with, and that an era of complicated legal battles over rights is close. On licensing, he said Big Tech companies are trying to persuade rights holders to allow training in exchange for a one-time fee, while others argue that once a work is used for training, AI can exploit it indefinitely.

Kim Young-deok, director of the Busan International Film Festival's Asian Contents & Film Market, said technology is evolving so quickly that rules are needed on what can be opened for public use, and that the legal debate is moving too slowly.

Director Kim Sung-soo, whose "12.12: The Day" was a 2023 hit, is producing an AI short called "Worm Train," which he presented at Busan's Asian Contents & Film Market, Variety reported. He told Korea JoongAng Daily that he runs every AI-generated character through a search engine because he worries someone may look similar.

Ha Jung-woo, standing vice chair of the National AI Strategy Committee, said at a screening of "Steelay" that Korea's domestic AI is behind on content generation and that copyright is harder to resolve for video, per Korea JoongAng Daily. Jang Hoon, CEO of the production company Creative Mango, told the paper that once AI films move past the experimental stage, a documented guarantee that content was not made through unauthorized use becomes as valuable as the intellectual property itself.

What to do before you generate

Keep a record of the process. The commission's guide says documenting the creation steps with video and other records can serve as important material for registration and for later disputes, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency summary of it. Applicants registering an AI-assisted work have to separate what the AI produced from what a human made, and a false filing can be punished.

Avoid prompting for a real person. Korea JoongAng Daily reports that most generative video programs now block requests that name a real person and uploads of real photographs, so the block is partly structural. Kim Sung-soo's habit of searching every generated face is the cheap check that catches an accidental resemblance before a client or a distributor does.

What comes next

The government is funding the wave and, on the industry's own account, has not yet fenced it. The Korean Film Council launched a program to support 38 AI-based feature and short films, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency are putting a record 19.8 billion won into AI content production this year, per Korea JoongAng Daily's September report. Sixteen cultural and content-creator organizations answered the national AI strategy with a joint statement arguing it prioritizes AI companies' access to copyrighted work over creators' rights.

Audience appetite is a separate question from legality. A Hankook Research survey of 1,000 adults in December 2025 found 15 percent viewed AI-generated images and videos positively and 32 percent negatively, with the negative share at 47 percent among respondents aged 18 to 29, according to the same article.

The likeliest next move, on the industry's account, is a verification layer rather than a new right. Korea JoongAng Daily reports the film industry sees a transparent system to check whether other people's works or likenesses were used as the realistic near-term task. Whether that arrives as a law, a registry or a contract term is not settled on any page read for this piece.

The Korea Copyright Commission's Guide to Copyright Registration for Generative AI-Assisted Works and its dispute prevention guide are both free to download, and the commission's English site is at copyright.or.kr/eng.