Stock brokerage Samsung Securities has found brand ambassadors who never skip rehearsal and are unlikely to make tabloid headlines: a four-member, AI-generated K-pop girl group called LUMINA.
The band’s debut music video, “Override”, has passed 3 million YouTube views about five weeks after its release, Reuters reported on Thursday. The video reached 1 million views within its first week and had surpassed 2.5 million views about a month after release.
LUMINA is entirely AI-generated. Beyond human planning, Samsung Securities’ team made the song, the characters and the video all with artificial intelligence, according to the company.
The group’s name was inspired by the English word “Luminous”, meaning shining. Its concept centres on four members with distinct personalities coming together to create a single, powerful spectrum.
The debut song “Override” combines electronica and dance music with techno rhythms. Samsung Securities said the song aimed to capture an attitude of rewriting one’s own standards rather than following answers set by the world.
The project was created to deliver messages about finance and investing — topics that can feel difficult and rigid — through K-pop content, one of the world’s most popular forms of entertainment. The brokerage plans to move away from hiring celebrities as advertising models and instead develop its own AI idol as a long-term digital communications asset.
Next up are a performance video, a follow-up song, member interviews, short-form challenges, investor education videos hosted by the group, and glimpses of the members’ daily lives, the company said.
Uhm Sewon, head of the brokerage’s media strategy team, said it was difficult to quantify measurable returns for the securities business yet, because it was LUMINA’s first music video.
There is one limit on the project: Samsung Securities has not registered copyright in the song, and as a brokerage it is not registered to earn revenue from music. Under South Korean government guidelines, music generated entirely by AI with no human creative input cannot be registered for copyright.
The experiment reflects a wider trend in South Korea, which ranked 12th in the world in generative AI use, posting the largest quarterly increase among major economies for the third consecutive time, according to Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute in September. Other brokerages, including Shinhan Securities and Mirae Asset Securities, have also launched entertainment-focused investment content.
Whether an AI idol can sell financial products remains an open question, but for now LUMINA has done what it was designed to do: get millions of people to watch a stockbroker’s music video.
