Culture Ministry's Supplementary Budget Set at 48.6 Billion KRW... Supporting AI Innovation and Successful APEC Hosting

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced on May 2 that the National Assembly finalized the first supplementary budget for the cultural sector in 2025 at 48.6 billion KRW during the plenary session held on May 1.

The budget includes a total of 21.5 billion KRW for three projects supporting cultural artificial intelligence (AI) innovation, as well as funding for cultural events to support the successful hosting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. These allocations were added following deliberation by the National Assembly. The ministry emphasized that, as competition to secure AI leadership is intensifying among major countries such as the United States, China, and the European Union (EU), it will actively support AI industry innovation through this supplementary budget for cultural AI.

First, to enhance the use of AI by Korean content companies, the ministry plans to invest a total of 24.5 billion KRW by increasing the original 2025 budget of 8 billion KRW for the AI content production support project by an additional 16.5 billion KRW through the supplementary budget. In particular, by utilizing the supplementary budget, the ministry will expand support for demonstration projects in which K-content companies use AI technology to produce webtoons, music, games, animation, and dramas. It will also newly launch support for "AI film production," where movies are created entirely using AI technology.

Second, the ministry plans to inject an additional 2.5 billion KRW to secure and open source data related to Korean culture. Accordingly, it will select five types of Korean cultural source data, such as Gugak and Hanbok, and make them available for AI training to help accurately promote Korean culture.

Third, as high-quality, large-scale datasets are essential for AI performance, the ministry will newly invest 2.5 billion KRW to provide reliable national knowledge information resources as AI training data. It will build AI text datasets focusing on books and academic journals with resolved copyright issues among the 2.09 million digitized original books held by the National Library of Korea, and will open and share these with the private sector, academia, and industry, thereby contributing to the activation of the AI ecosystem.

In addition, the budget includes support for hosting the APEC Cultural Festival (including K-pop performances) to showcase Korea's cultural strength during the APEC summit scheduled for the second half of this year, as well as additional funding for establishing fire prevention systems in traditional temples and for repairing and maintaining aging facilities.

Yong Hosung, First Vice Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism, stated, "This supplementary budget is not just short-term funding, but a starting point for strengthening the core pillar of 'culture and content' in the national AI strategy." He added, "We will swiftly and thoroughly implement the budget secured through this supplementary budget to not only innovate the content industry but also support the development of a Korean-style AI ecosystem."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.