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J·Index / Countries / South Korea

AI in South Korea's news media

26 verified, source-linked AI implementations across 16 news organizations, 2017–2025. South Korea ranks 19th worldwide by documented cases.
East Asia and the Pacific2017–2025
Cases
26
Organizations
16
Active since
2017
Controversies
2
Compared with the global pattern, Multimedia & Visual Production accounts for 19% of cases here against 4% worldwide; and Workflow & Operations (General) accounts for 15% of cases here against 3% worldwide.

What AI is used for — and how that differs

South Koreaworldwide sharepp = percentage-point difference
Multimedia & Visual Production5+15pp
Editorial Workflow & Writing Assistance4-1pp
Workflow & Operations (General)4+13pp
Transcription & Translation2+5pp
Audience Experience & Personalisation2+1pp
Talent Development & Upskilling2+1pp
Content Licensing & Partnerships2+3pp
Content Production & Automation2-7pp
AI Search & Answer Products1+2pp

How far adoption has gone

1 – Access2
2 – Adoption8
3 – Proficiency14
4 – Ways of Working2
5 – Reorganizing0

Who is adopting

Funding: Own budget (11), Public broadcaster / state media (11), Tech company (Google/GNI) (2), Tech company (OpenAI) (1)

Notable cases

2025Seoul Economic Daily

AI LINK (Linking Insight, News & Korea: Let News Flow) — integrated AI journalism ecosystem designed to break the 'text prison' by converting articles into formats that reach diverse audiences; four-engine architecture: (1) AI PRISM — personalized newsletter generator delivering identical news through different interpretive lenses for eight reader types (investors, job seekers, etc.); (2) AI WAVE — converts text…

Newsletter Creation & Management3 – Proficiency
AI LINK ecosystem (Seoul Economic Daily in-house; AI PRISM + AI WAVE + AI GLOBE + AI NOVA;Source →

2025KBS (Korea Broadcasting System)

AI-generated predictive footage of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un standing on Tiananmen Gate aired in KBS 9pm news bulletin on September 1 2025 — two days before China's actual WWII 80th anniversary military parade on September 3; footage included on-screen 'AI-generated footage' label

Multimedia & Visual Production2 – Adoption⚑ controversy
AI video generation (specific tool not disclosed)Source →

2025Yonhap News Agency

Participant in Google AI article overviews pilot on Google News (announced Dec. 11, 2025) — South Korea's primary national wire service joins Google's AI article overviews pilot; builds on existing commercial relationships through the Google News Showcase scheme; deal delivers AI-powered article overviews on Google News pages, audio briefings, and real-time information in the Gemini app; articles carry clear…

Content Licensing & Partnerships2 – Adoption
Google AI article overviews; Google Gemini; Google News Showcase APISource →

2024Korea Press Foundation (KPF) — BigKinds

BigKinds AI news search service rebuilt as RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system: users submit natural language questions; query engine discerns search intent, search engine retrieves and ranks responses from 82 million articles in real-time; replaces keyword-based search with contextual AI responses

Audience Experience & Personalisation3 – Proficiency
Upstage Solar LLM"; RAG architecture; BigKinds platformSource →

2025Chosun Ilbo

Upstage Solar Pro automated English translation pipeline — decomposes Korean articles into 6 JSON fields (body, headline, SEO, captions, quotes, metadata); applies glossary normalisation for consistent romanisation; context-aware full-article translation; launched February 2025; ~30× increase in translation volume without additional staff

Transcription & Translation3 – Proficiency
Upstage Solar Pro (Korean LLM); custom JSON pipelineSource →

2024Dong-A Ilbo

'AskBiz' chatbot for Dong-A Business Review (DBR) magazine: readers ask questions about DBR articles and receive AI-generated answers; built on Dong-A's own small language model (sLLM) rather than ChatGPT API — differentiating factor cited as proprietary training on DBR's own content corpus

Audience Experience & Personalisation3 – Proficiency
Proprietary sLLM (Dong-A Ilbo in-house)Source →

Elsewhere in East Asia and the Pacific

Australia 28Cambodia 2China 75Hong Kong 6Indonesia 24Japan 24Malaysia 11Mongolia 2Myanmar 1New Zealand 25Philippines 16Singapore 8
Data from J·Index, the Journalism AI Index — every case verified against a published source. See the methodological note for how cases are collected and coded. Updated 2026-07-23.