On Thursday, Korean Prime Time Finds Out If You Can Date a Tablet

There is a shot in the trailer of a man in a jacuzzi.

He is alone in the bubbling water, holding a tablet in a waterproof pouch, which he has floated inside a rainbow-coloured inflatable ring to keep it steady. On the screen is his girlfriend. SBS's own caption over the image reads:

「태블릿에 갇혀버린 나의 연인」 "My lover, trapped inside a tablet."

The network's promotional department wrote the sentence a critic would have written, and then used it to sell the show.

나의 AI 파트너 – 기이안 연애 premieres on SBS at 9pm on Thursday 20 August, and runs for six weekly episodes. Three people live alongside an AI partner and are filmed doing it. It is being billed — by SBS — as Korea's first AI dating reality format.

The title is a pun, and half the press has misprinted it

기이안 is 기이한, meaning bizarre or uncanny, with the webtoonist 기안84's name folded into the middle of it. SBS's poster renders that middle syllable in a different iridescent colour so you can see the seam. The network's own English title is "My AI Partner: Strange Love."

Several Korean outlets have printed it as 기이한 연애, losing the joke entirely.

The participants — SBS labels them 인간 대표, "human representatives" — are 기안84, comedian 장도연 and actor 이유비. The studio panel watching it back is 장도연 again, 강남 and 이준, and there is a nice piece of construction there: the two added panellists are cast as friends of the participants, with 강남 calling 기안84 "기안이 형."

The director, 원승재, previously made Netflix's Better Late Than Single — a show about Korean adults who have never dated, which sits at number three on our own ranking of Korean dating shows. He has moved from people who have never had a relationship to people having one with software.

Nobody has said what the AI is

This is the most interesting fact about the programme, and it is an absence.

Across SBS's programme page, its press releases, all seven official teasers and roughly two dozen Korean articles, no product name, no company, no model and no partnership is named anywhere. The language stays deliberately abstract: a dating world implemented with AI, a romance fantasy designed by AI.

What can be established is only what the footage shows. The partners appear as photorealistic human faces — moving portraits on tablets in rugged black cases, some with carry straps. They speak Korean in real time and are subtitled. 기안84's partner is a woman; 장도연's and 이유비's are men.

And every one of the four fifteen-second teasers is titled "…의 정체는?!" — the identity of X's partner, revealed?!

So the withholding is not an oversight. SBS is selling what the thing is as the hook, which means we will not know until it airs, and neither will anyone else.

There is a second tell. SBS's poster refuses the AI a face: the three partners appear as glowing, featureless silhouettes — a blank head, a reaching hand, a profile — while the actual teaser footage shows completely realistic human faces. The marketing hides what the programme displays.

What is actually in the teasers

Not much, and that is worth saying plainly: everything below comes from about fifty seconds of promotional footage cut by the people selling the show. Nothing has aired. No critic has seen an episode.

With that stated:

• A tablet propped upright on the pillow beside his head while he sleeps. Caption: an experiment the world has never seen.
• The swimming pool, shot from above: he swims a length alone, towing the tablet behind him on a small float. SBS's own caption on that frame reads 「덱스는 사람이랑 수영을 했는데」 — Dex got to swim with a real person, though — the network comparing its show, unfavourably, to a conventional dating format.
• The jacuzzi, as above.
• At an amusement park, 이유비 wears a plush character headband — and the AI boyfriend on the screen she is holding up is wearing one too. (Not the same one, we should say: we looked closely, and hers has a carrot and a rabbit on it while his has two pandas. Somebody still had to decide he was wearing a headband at all.)
• 장도연 holding her tablet up in a public space, with the faces of real bystanders pixelated out.
• 장도연 in tears, hand over her face, captioned 「사랑해」.
• 기안84 alone at an outdoor table, the tablet propped on a stand opposite him like a dinner date. Elsewhere he drinks soju across from it, and takes a photo-booth two-shot holding it.

The dialogue released so far is short and, in fairness to SBS, well chosen:

「어젯밤 어땠어?」 — "How was last night?" 「나쁘진 않았어」 — "It wasn't bad."

And, over the soju:

「우리가 실제로 만날 수는 없을까?」 — "Couldn't we actually meet, in real life?"

And the line that gives the game away about how the programme is captioned:

「(인간) 네가 현실에 없는 게 너무 아쉽다」 — "(Human) It's such a shame you don't exist in reality."

When 기안84 speaks, SBS's subtitles label the speaker "인간)" — Human. The show has decided which of the two parties needs identifying.

What the participants said before filming

The only first-person testimony that exists is from before any of this aired. 기안84, in July:

「기계라서 몰입이 안 될 것 같다. 거짓으로 연기할 수 없어서 걱정」

"I didn't think I'd be able to get immersed, because it's a machine. I was worried, because I can't fake it."

The production team's framing:

「AI가 인간의 모든 능력을 빠르게 따라잡고 있는 요즘, 과연 '사랑'까지 가능한 것인지 질문을 던지고 싶었다」

"With AI rapidly catching up to every human ability, we wanted to ask whether even love is possible."

Note that 이유비 has said nothing publicly. The line attributed to her in most coverage comes from SBS's own cast-page copywriting, not from her mouth. We are not going to quote a network's marketing as a person's speech.

Korea's reaction, which is funnier than the show

The largest community thread on the trailer has drawn around 370,000 views. The tone is not outrage — it is delighted mockery of the format, not of the people in it:

"So you've got to chug soju straight from the bottle before it feels like dating." (383 upvotes)

"Did reality just hit him? He's swigging from the bottle, on network TV." (295)

"The fact it's tied to the swing with a cord is killing me."

"Worse than a VTuber date — at least there it's human-to-human."

"Dating shows have officially run out of ideas."

Two responses stand out. The first is the theory, upvoted repeatedly, that the twist is a real person: "I bet it was a real human all along — they only AI'd the face." Given that SBS is explicitly withholding what the AI is, that is not a stupid guess.

The second is that four separate commenters independently wrote the same thing: "Isn't this just the film Her?"**

One dissent, and it may be the correct one: "Weirdly, this might turn out to be genuinely philosophical."

One thing we should be honest about

Korean headlines are calling this a 화제성 폭발 — a buzz explosion.

SBS's own teaser view counts are 12,721, 5,611, 5,609, 2,100, 1,725, 1,153, 1,106 and 999.

A single community thread has drawn roughly thirty times the views of the network's flagship teaser. The interest is real, but it is community interest in something people find absurd, not audience demand that a broadcaster has manufactured. "Buzz explosion" is the press release talking.

Why now, though

There is a straightforward answer, and it is not on television.

제타, an AI character-chat app made by the Korean firm 스캐터랩, reported roughly six million signups and 1.4 million monthly users as of May 2026, ranked first by usage time among Korean AI chatbot apps earlier this year, and raised around 50 billion won. SBS's own pitch document opens with the line "an era of millions of AI lovers" — and for once the marketing copy is describing something that exists.

The programme is also not alone in its own schedule. SBS premiered a dating show on 3 August featuring participants with serious illness; a music channel launched another on 7 August. Korean commentators are reading all three as the same wave of format escalation, which is a more interesting frame than "network does AI gimmick."

The detail that ends the piece

Every one of SBS's official teaser uploads carries a standard rights notice in its description. Translated, it reads:

No unauthorised reproduction, redistribution, or use for AI training.

A broadcaster is about to spend six weeks asking whether a human being can fall in love with an artificial intelligence, and it has attached a warning telling artificial intelligence to keep away from the footage.

It airs on Thursday — 20 August, two days from now.

For where this sits among Korea's dating formats — and there are a lot of them — see our ranked guide. For the state of Korean AI more broadly, sovereign AI, explained.

Images: three panels from SBS's official teaser still for 「나의 AI 파트너 – 기이안 연애」, distributed 6 August 2026, used as promotional material for coverage of the programme and credited to the rights-holder. Photo: SBS (사진=SBS). Listing card — 이유비 holding her AI partner up at an amusement park. Cover — the overhead pool frame, tablet towed on a float. Hero — the jacuzzi, with SBS's own caption 「태블릿에 갇혀버린 나의 연인」 burned into the frame. All three are native crops from a 3200×4000 source with no upscaling, and we left SBS's programme bug, age rating and premiere banner in shot as provenance.

One note on the credit, because it looked wrong at first. SBS's entertainment-news pages carry the string 「사진=게티이미지코리아」 — a Getty credit — which would have changed what we could do. It turns out to be content-management boilerplate: the string sits only in an image's alt attribute, appears identically on unrelated programmes, and is flagged never to render on the page. Three independent outlets receiving the same distribution all credit SBS, and the frames carry SBS's own overlays and subtitle styling. It is SBS's material.

We also corrected this article against the pictures. An earlier draft said the AI partner wore the same headband as 이유비; at full magnification hers carries a carrot and a rabbit and his carries two pandas. Coordinated, not identical — and we would rather say what is in the frame.

This is a preview of a programme that has not aired, and almost everything in it is therefore the producer's framing rather than observed fact. The scheduling, cast and format are verified against SBS's own programme listing and its entertainment-news releases of 5 and 6 August 2026; the teaser contents are described from SBS's official promotional still and its teaser uploads, examined directly. We say plainly that no AI product, company or model has been named, because that is a deliberate withholding on SBS's part rather than a gap in our reporting — every teaser is titled around the partner's "identity" being revealed. Quotations are from SBS-distributed material and from an interview 기안84 gave in July; 이유비's widely quoted "line" is SBS cast-page copy and is not treated here as a statement by her. The claim that this is Korea's first AI dating format is SBS's marketing claim, repeated by every outlet including us, and independently verified by nobody. The community reaction is drawn from the single largest thread on the trailer, with upvote counts given. Deliberately omitted: a reported international simulcast, which we could trace only to a user-edited wiki and could not corroborate anywhere; the episode count and full production credits, which rest on the same single source and which we give only where SBS's own scheduling supports them; and anything whatsoever about the past work, personal lives or previous controversies of anyone appearing in the programme — this article covers a television format and the public reaction to its trailer, and nothing else.