As Korea pushes to embed artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics across its factories and offices, the impact on jobs is no longer abstract. Workers are already feeling it. This is the second in a four-part series examining how AI is reshaping work on the ground — the opportunities it creates, the protections it erodes and the rules that unions, employers and policymakers are, or are not, putting in place to govern that transition. — ED.
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.
Source: Korea Times News
