AI’s creative bargain: Speed for originality

AI can make more, faster and for less. The harder question for artists is what they may lose in return: the creative instincts and originality built through years of thinking, experimenting and failing.

“I believe Go was where the future arrived first,” novelist Chang Kang-myoung wrote in his reportage “The Future That Arrived First” (2025).

The moment referenced goes back to 2016, when an AI program named AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Se-dol, and thereby shattered the longstanding convention that had governed the world of human creativity: that AI cannot beat humans at Go, or in the creative realm.

Elite players' moves were once treated as works of art. Today, professional Go players study and analyze moves made not by humans but by AI, competing through a rigorous calculus of probabilities.

“What happened in the Go world over the several years beginning in 2016 will happen across many other industries in the future,” Chang wrote.

That included the literary world he inhabits, and his assumptions are no longer hypothetical.

The inevitable destroyer

AI adoption in content industries — namely publishing, comics, music and film — climbed sharply from 7.8 percent in the first half of 2023 to 32.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency. The figure was the highest since the agency began issuing the report.

The creators who spoke to the JoongAng Ilbo shared a similar sense of unease. While they said using AI had become essential, they also worried that it was dulling their own creative abilities. The concerns are reminiscent of those that swept through the Go community in the early days of AI.

The literary world was jolted in November 2022 when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a conversational AI service powered by a large language model (LLM).

Japanese novelist Rie Qudan, who won the Akutagawa Prize in 2024, said about 5 percent of her award-winning novel “Sympathy Tower Tokyo” (2024) consisted of sentences generated by ChatGPT and used verbatim.

A University of Pittsburgh study published the same year found that people correctly distinguished poetry by renowned writers such as William Shakespeare from AI-generated verse just 46.6 percent of the time.

Coming to the surface

For years, Korean literary writers largely kept quiet about their experiences with AI. That reticence is now fading.

In January, veteran novelist Hwang Sok-yong revealed that he had used ChatGPT while working on his latest novel. “I used ChatGPT to help with research and structuring,” Hwang said.

Author Kim Ae-ran has also spoken openly about using AI. “I find AI useful for research and searches,” Kim said in April.

Novelist Kim Yeon-su went a step further, crediting both themselves and AI as authors of the theme statement for the Seoul International Book Fair in June. “I have experimented with different approaches to writing using the paid version of ChatGPT since 2024,” Kim said.

The growing presence of AI is even more palpable in design and video production. “AI is integrated across design software now, which makes it impossible to avoid,” said Hwang, a visual designer in their eighth year in the field. “You can get a perfectly usable result with just one click.”

“More directors are actively using AI to cut production costs,” said Kim, a cinematographer with 10 years of experience. “I’ve even been told not to put too much effort into filming because AI will be used in postproduction, and instead to shoot footage that is easier for AI to work with.”

Popular in the real world

AI-generated music has even begun making its way onto the charts. One example is “Forest of the Heart” (translated), which entered both Korea’s music streaming platform Melon’s Top 100 and daily chart on Sept. 7.

An ordinary user under the nickname “Joseon Hip-hop” created the song by leaving the entire process to the AI music generator Suno.

A composer with seven years of experience also began using Suno to write music this year. “In the past, producing a song cost a lot because I had to collaborate with specialists in different fields,” the composer said. “Now I can make a song on my own for an AI subscription that costs about 40,000 won ($29) a month. It has dramatically reduced costs.”

In gaming and animation, where much of the work involves creating worlds from scratch, AI has sped up image production. “There is still postproduction work to do, but being able to generate in a minute something that would otherwise take months is revolutionary,” said a game user-acquisition video producer. “AI now takes up about 70 percent of my working hours.”

Efficiency erodes creativity

AI has brought once-unimaginable efficiency to art and creative work. But as those gains grow, so does the fear that the technology is eroding creators’ capacity to imagine. Reliance on automated tools can bypass the very process through which people develop creative intelligence and hone their artistic craft.

A study by researchers at Peking University last year found that users’ creative performance declined after they stopped using AI following sustained use. Participants who successfully completed creative tasks with ChatGPT for seven days saw a significant drop in performance once they gave up the tool, the researchers said. The team also consistently observed a “homogenization of content” among those using AI.

Creators who had honed their craft before AI arrived tended to take the concern more seriously. “Your skills come from the know-how you gain through failure and revision, but that process of trial and error has disappeared since AI came along,” said Hwang, a designer with eight years of experience who began using AI four years ago.

A composer voiced a similar concern. “AI usually produces something close to the average,” the composer said. “Using it can make me feel boxed in, so there are many times when I deliberately work without it.”

Teaching becomes a moral dilemma

The dilemma runs even deeper in arts education. Nam Ye-won, a first-year student majoring in digital media and broadcasting at Seoul Institute of the Arts, is actively learning to use AI tools such as ChatGPT and Nano Banana as the industry embraces the technology.

“I’m concerned because I spend less time thinking through ideas, discovering them and developing them,” Nam said.

“Some students simply enter AI-written prompts into a video-generation tool and submit the results as assignments,” said Yu Jun-oh, a professor of film, television and multimedia at Sungkyunkwan University. “Students need a strong foundation in critically analyzing and understanding generated videos so that they do not stop thinking for themselves too early in the process.”

To be a human creator

Creators say that to keep human “creative intelligence” from disappearing altogether, they must ultimately move beyond one question: Will AI replace art?

The key, they say, is to approach AI with a critical eye and explore what it can offer beyond simple utility, while holding on to their identity as creators.

“The creators who endure will be those who can use AI as a tool to examine and test their own ideas,” Prof. Yu said.

Since 2022, poet Kim Eon and literary critic Heo Hee have studied AI alongside cybertext designer Kown Boh-youn and defined the technology as a “literary machine” with its own linguistic characteristics.

“To understand what technology changes about literature, we need to use it and examine what it does,” Heo said. “That is why we started the group.”

BY CHOI HYE-RI [[email protected]]