Declining income, no consent: AI eats into Korea's creative, language workforce

It is a familiar sound: the brisk, slightly metallic voice at the end of a TV shopping segment, rattling off legal disclaimers. For many voice actors, that sound now means a lost livelihood and a warning of what may come next. Instead of hiring a professional, companies now pick a digital voice and just start typing.

“That used to be our work,” Choi Jae-ho, head of the Korea Voice Performance Association, told The Korea Times. “Now they go into a system, download a voice they like and type in the script. That work is simply gone.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the most powerful new colleague — and competitor — for Korea’s creative and language professionals, from voice actors and webtoon artists to interpreters. It is cutting deep into some people’s incomes, quietly erasing entry-level jobs and forcing unions and associations into emergency talks on how to protect their jobs, even as many professionals say it is also making their best work faster and better.

Few professional groups have felt the shock as viscerally as voice actors. Choi says the average income among many members has fallen by half over the past year or two as AI-generated voices seep into nearly every corner of the market that used to pay them.

The seeds were planted a decade earlier, when global content companies like Netflix started pouring money into Korean dubbing. At the time, it looked like a boom, he said.

“We really thought, ‘this is the move from TV to streaming platform,’” Choi recalled.

Only later did he and other actors realize how profoundly AI would transform the business. The contracts they had signed contained clauses allowing companies to process, reuse and repurpose recorded voices for future “new technologies” — long before the true power of large language models was ever imagined.

In the following years, some domestic tech firms also began recording voice actors en masse to train Korean synthetic voice models. Voice actors were offered lump sums, he said, often with clauses that gave firms effectively unlimited, exclusive use of their modeled voices.

The consequences are now audible almost everywhere. Corporate public relations videos, government promotion clips and many online ads use AI narration.

“They used to be our voices, with pay for each job,” Choi said. “Now almost all of them are AI, trained on real actors’ voices, but the work is gone and there is little income for us even when our sound is still being used.”

In response, the association is lobbying for AI-specific standard contracts and a new “voice publicity right” that would treat every person’s voice as a protected commercial attribute. He said the actors want legal tools to challenge unlimited AI use based on old contracts and to ban training or cloning without explicit consent.

Webtoon artists listen to a special lecture about artificial intelligence and how to use the technology in their work at a webtoon forum, March 13. Courtesy of Korea Cartoonists' Association

Webtoon artists' dilemma

If voice actors are fighting AI in their ears, webtoon creators are fighting AI in their files and feeds.

“Mongletoon,” an AI-generated series from Chun Woo-won, grandson of former President Chun Doo-hwan, drew extensive attention and debate recently over what counts as “real” creation. For professionals, the spectacle captures both the promise and the threat of the new tools that now enable anyone to produce something that looks like a webtoon — without years of drawing practice or a production team backing them.

Many artists, especially young ones, already feel the chill, according to Kwon Hyuk-joo, head of the Korea Cartoonists' Association.

“The most striking change is that requests for simple illustrations and promotional comics have decreased,” he said. “Assistants, in particular, feel this as a direct threat. The problem isn’t just that there is less work; it’s that the very perception that ‘this can be done by AI’ is changing the market.”

That perception cuts both ways. He acknowledges that, while work for simple coloring and background assistants is likely to decline, short-form animation and other content spin-offs may create new opportunities for artists who also take advantage of AI tools.

When asked about the most serious AI issue facing the industry, Kwon pointed to large-scale, unauthorized training on scraped comics as his top concern.

“In this process, there is no consent or compensation for the artists and there is no way to know which works were used for which models. We are told that webtoons offered as paid content on platforms are not used for training. But there is currently no way to verify that,” he said.

To set up what he calls a “minimum safety net,” Kwon wants mandatory transparency about training data.

“We need to make it obligatory to disclose what data AI uses,” Kwon said. “Transparency is the starting point for any institutional discussion.”

At present, artists only find out — if at all — after their work has already been ingested into datasets. He wants a preemptive system so authors can clearly mark their work as off-limits before training happens.

“One thing is clear: An AI industry built without protecting creators can never be sustainable. Korea’s webtoons are the world’s largest market and a key export. If the creator ecosystem collapses, the industry itself cannot exist,” Kwon said.

Asked whether AI would eventually replace most human artists, he was cautious but firm.

“It will certainly replace some parts of the work,” he said. “But it cannot replace the essence of creation. Webtoons are not just a technical product — they are work that deals with ‘fun.’ So the most realistic scenario would be that the creator’s role shifts from ‘producer’ to ‘planner.’”

Interpreters squeezed

Another field now at the center of AI-replacement fears is translation and interpretation, where mid-tier jobs are already feeling the impact of automated captions and translation apps.

At international events, organizers who once hired simultaneous interpreters now project automated captions on a screen, relying on AI tools that promise “good enough” real-time translation for free or at a fraction of the cost. In corporate settings, too, mid-level meetings that might previously have brought in freelance interpreters are increasingly handled with AI-powered apps.

Huh Ji-un, head of the Korean Association of Translators and Interpreters, which represents graduates of professional graduate schools in the field, said the squeeze is most visible in the middle of the market rather than at the very top.

“Top-class interpreters will survive,” she said. “But people who only offer basic services will find it harder and harder and the market is likely to become much more polarized.”

On the translation side, Huh said the impact is more advanced and more visible, especially through the spread of “post-editing” work, in which AI translation services produce a first draft and then human experts correct and refine it. For large volumes of manuals, user guides and other technical documentation, “the share of post-editing is growing,” she said.

On top of the pressure and changes created by AI, Huh urged the government to build basic protections for professional interpreters and translators, noting that many freelancers are not covered by social insurance and policies designed for corporate workers and, therefore, remain more vulnerable to AI challenges. She also warned against state agencies selecting the cheapest bidder — which is typically the one using AI tools — for interpretation services in settings such as courts and parliamentary hearings, arguing that this can both undermine citizens’ right to understand the proceedings and hollow out the pipeline of skilled human interpreters.

The demands of the three groups converge on a single point: Korea is racing to deploy AI across industries, from health care to cultural exports, but has yet to offer concrete protections for the people whose work is being used to train the very systems replacing them.

All three said the country needs rules and safeguards so AI becomes a tool that supports, rather than replaces, people’s creative and language work — and that a human core must be protected if these industries are to survive.