SBS Confirms Release of So Ji Sub K-drama Agent Kim Reactivated for End of June 2026 and Reveals the Drama Used AI to Cut Costs and Increase Speed
I can’t tell if it’s just serendipitous timing or inevitable irony that on the week C-drama has a rumor that supporting cast for an upcoming drama will be replaced by AI actors there is the actual confirmed news out of K-dramas that an upcoming drama fully used AI to increase production speed and cut costs. The drama is SBS father and spy thriller Agent Kim Reactivated with So Ji Sub, with the network giving a showcase this week that included this drama and sharing the use of AI technology for the production. The production used AI for background and CGI details and said it cut costs and increased speed of production by 60%. None of the actors or actresses are AI but likely a lot of what used to be post-production work or even set builds were generated by AI. Korean has always been on the forefront of technology in the recent decades and I’m not surprised this has already happened so openly and doesn’t seen to be generating a lot of backlash there.
Jobs – Who/what kind of workers did/didn’t get hired as a direct result of AI use?
Quality – Is it better or worse?
IF the ‘showcase’ includes a description and analysis of how and where AI was used in this series and how it’s likely to be used in the future, I’d be interested in seeing it.
@Jeannie – seconded. I remember during covid there were dramas like Vincenzo using green screen in place of some sets/locations, which at that time was unavoidable because of course they couldn’t travel to Italy during a pandemic. But the result still looked a bit obviously fake. I honestly wonder how much AI is going to hollow out the jobs for workers who do things like conceive and build sets, practical effects, lighting etc
(not kdrama but even a huge budget drama like Stranger Things went from using practical effects in seasons 1-4, to using all-CGI/AI effects and all green screen in season 5 and the difference was night and day because the final season effects looked so cheap and fake, bad lighting, etc…. it was so badly received that people started wondering if the creators were just pocketing their budget. And this was Netflix’s biggest budget show, I can’t imagine what it’ll do to kdramas in the long run)
Pass.
Just to clarify, CGI and AI are not the same thing. CGI has been used in 99% of film and drama post-productions for a long time. When people say AI is being used in production, they mean using artificial intelligence instead of CGI engineers to generate visuals. The goal is to reduce the high costs and long hours traditionally required for CGI. The real debate or controversy is not whether AI can speed up product delivery, but whether it can actually match the quality of human CGI engineers. AI relies on collecting massive amounts of online data to train its models. So far, it still cannot master motion on a pixel-to-pixel level. CGI engineering is an creative art. The job market is still pretty good at this moment. Company management is testing water by doing experiments on small projects here and there to see the market feedback.
Korea seems to be increasingly adopting AI into its dramas. KBS already announced that it will use AI for its upcoming daeha drama, Munmu. KBS also disclosed use of AI for its DAILY SOAP OPERA, Our Good Days, which looks just as cheap as its ordinary soap operas.