Kyogu Lee

The K-pop industry, a towering cultural and financial force, has been quicker to experiment with AI than the American music industry. While the conversation about AI and music in the U.S. is largely dominated by concerns about copyright infringement and job loss, K-pop groups are already creating digital twins of themselves, and entirely digital AI-groups have found fandoms.

Kyogu Lee, the CEO of the AI company Supertone, is close to the center of this experimentation. Supertone is backed by HYBE, South Korea’s most prominent label of BTS fame. The company used AI to resurrect the voice of deceased South Korean folk superstar Kim Kwang-seok and enabled the HYBE artist Lee Hyun to release a new song in six different languages. 

“I truly believe that this takes the fan-artist connection to the next level, where fans can feel more included and not only listen but understand the artists’ messages in their own voices, no matter where they are from,” Lee wrote in an email to TIME. 
In June, Supertone unveiled a ​​virtual artist group called SYI\IDI8 (pronounced “Syndi-eight”), which is powered by the company’s vocal AI technologies. The company also released a new AI tool that allows people to speak or sing through different voices in real time. Curious gamers, YouTube streamers, and music engineers have already tried it out and posted their results. Next in the pipeline is Supertone Play, a text-to-speech service that creates recordings of scripts in multiple languages. All of these tools are meant to “amplify storytelling,” Lee tells TIME.