I am covering trend, food and fashion. Previously, I covered diplomacy, city, environment and unification.
1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves
Image generated by Nano Banana
By Kim Se-jeong
Publishing industry warns of crisis of reader trust
For generations, Koreans have regarded books as the most reliable form of information. They're slower than social media, but more carefully made and more accountable.
That basic trust is now under strain as generative artificial intelligence (AI) quietly fills bookstores and e-book platforms with nonfiction titles on self-help, money management and other popular topics, often with little transparency about who — or what — wrote them.
The rapid spread of AI-generated books forces an uncomfortable question: When you pick up a book in Korea today, how sure can you be that a human mind stands behind it?
Quantity over quality
That question already has an answer visible on the shelves. In brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries, readers are running into titles that feature tables of contents that look plausible at first glance, but open to pages with unnatural phrasing and uncanny images that bear little relation to the text. On online storefronts, the pattern becomes even clearer. Many covers have eerily similar artwork with auto-generated titles, and some small, unknown publishers are pushing out more than 100 books in a single month.
“AI-generated books have increased significantly in recent years,” said an official from Aladin Communications, one of Korea's largest online booksellers.
The trend has a structural explanation. According to the Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea, the number of one-person publishing houses reached 6,800 in 2023, up from 5,580 in 2019, partly due to a proliferation of micropublishers for whom AI offers a way to produce at scale with almost no overhead.
Some have leaned heavily into generative AI. Luminary Books in particular has emerged at the center of a growing controversy in Korea's publishing industry.
Founded by engineers in 2022, the company released about 9,000 titles in 2025 alone, covering subjects ranging from economics and humanities to fashion and food, all at a pace that would be unthinkable without extensive use of AI.
The scale of production drew backlash from industry observers and the wider public, who accused the company of undermining publishing ethics by mass-producing books with only minimal human involvement.
The Seoul-based publisher is also being criticized for exploiting Korea's legal deposit system. Publishers are required to submit both digital and print copies of their books to the National Library of Korea (NLK) and the National Assembly Library within 30 days of publication, and in return they receive payment equal to the value of one copy. The system was designed to preserve the nation's publication records and support the industry, but critics argue Luminary used it as a revenue stream, mass-submitting AI-generated titles with little literary or informational merit.
As criticism grew, the NLK pushed back. It rejected 395 e-books submitted by Luminary Books between July and September 2025, citing "insufficient length, compilations of publicly available materials and repetitive content." The library has since pledged to review its legal deposit policies more broadly in response to a sharp rise in deposit payouts. When the NLK first began accepting e-book deposits in 2016, it paid out 12.1 million won over five months, but the figure climbed to 262.7 million won in 2024.
Kim Tae-gyun, owner of scientific publisher Cocoon Books, warned that the fallout could extend across the sector.
“Compensation from the NLK may not seem large, but losing the system entirely could damage the industry's finances,” Kim said.
This photo shows a page from an artificial intelligence-translated Korean edition of Homer's "Odyssey." The circled word "alppano" is internet slang, short for "It's not my business." Captured from ruliweb.com
Luminary Books defended its practices, calling AI-generated content an inevitable trend in publishing.
“AI has already established itself as a useful tool for enhancing productivity and quality across various industries, including publishing,” the company said in a statement. It also said that many authors are already making use of AI in their work and that a number of bestsellers from established publishers appear to contain text that was largely AI-generated.
Transparency required
Some industry insiders note that the legal and financial stakes are secondary to a more fundamental concern — declining confidence in books themselves.
Park Yong-soo, executive director of the Korean Publishers Association (KPA), said a friend recently sent him a photo of an AI-produced book that had gone to print with obvious typos left uncorrected.
“I’m worried that the rise of generative AI could undermine readers’ trust in books,” Park told The Korea Times.
In response, some publishers are tightening internal rules. Communication Books, which specializes in translated classics and nonfiction, strengthened its guidelines for authors after fielding questions from readers. The company publishes a series of books on AI and some customers have asked whether those titles were themselves written by AI.
“Our view is that publishing is a product of human history, so we consider it undesirable for tools to carry out the publishing process. So our way of addressing the demand was making guidelines for the authors we work with," a Communication Books official said.
The guidelines are specific: AI-generated sentences may not be inserted directly into manuscripts and doing so is treated as plagiarism. Writers bear full responsibility for any errors caused by AI-generated content and AI cannot be credited as a co-author. If authors have used generative AI as a support tool, they are required to disclose that fact in a preface or an explanatory note.
Booksellers are also moving to increase transparency. Starting last year, online platform Aladin has asked publishers to declare any AI involvement and displays that information on each book’s product page.
"We've observed that readers want to know whether the books they purchase are written by AI," the Aladin official said.
The photo on the right shows the cover of an artificial intelligence-generated book about Egyptian mythology published by Luminary Books. The book on the left is written by a human author on the same topic. Captured from Kyobo Book's online store
Ethics in limbo
Outside Korea, major players have moved faster to set boundaries on AI in publishing.
In 2023, Amazon introduced guidelines for AI-generated books on its Kindle e-book platform, capping self-publishing submissions at three titles per day and requiring authors to disclose whether their content is AI-generated, in an effort to keep low-quality material from flooding the service.
In August 2024, Penguin Random House made a statement saying that AI would serve only as an assistant and that final publications would remain shaped by human creativity and editorial oversight. "Human creativity and care will remain the essence of our mission to make books for everyone," it said.
Publisher Pan Macmillan similarly emphasized its commitment to “human stories, by human writers,” stating that any use of AI must support, not replace, human creativity.
By comparison, Korean publishers and institutions have been slower to formalize rules. The KPA has discussed drafting a "Publishing Ethics Code for Artificial Intelligence" as a form of self-imposed regulation, but the proposal remains unfinished.
Park acknowledged the difficulty of reaching consensus in an industry that is simultaneously worried about AI and dependent on what it offers.
"We also want to address readers' distrust of the market, so we did discuss it internally, but haven't finalized it yet," he said. "Publishers are also showing strong interest in using AI to improve operational productivity ... There are many different opinions and it's difficult to find a unified voice."
But many share the same instinct that human judgment should remain at the center. Few in the industry believe AI-generated books will fully displace human authors, even if they dominate in volume.
Jaeum & Moeum Publishing, one of Korea's major players, framed it as a question of what publishing fundamentally is.
"Publishing is not merely writing but a comprehensive art form, so we see little room for that possibility," the company said regarding the idea of AI taking over publishing.
Kim of Cocoon Books noted that in a market saturated with AI-generated content, the books that ultimately sell — the ones that matter — will have something an algorithmic model cannot replicate.
"In the end, a book that truly needs to be read will have to have a person in it," Kim said.