Hyundai Department Store uses AI to write advertising copy

South Korea's Hyundai Department Store Co. on Sunday said it will officially introduce on Thursday an artificial intelligence (AI) copywriting system dubbed Lewis, which is optimized to produce marketing text in a first for the domestic department store industry.

Lewis is based on an AI language model and possess human-like understanding sentences and contexts, and can also write text. HyperClova, the uber-powerful AI language model platform of the country's largest web portal Naver, serves as Lewis' basic engine. Hyperclova is hailed as AI that understands and speaks Korean the best through machine learning from Korean-language data 6,500 times larger than that of GPT-3 of the US OpenAI.

Lewis was developed under the concept of a young 20-something man who loves literature and is interested in marketing trends. The name was derived from British author C.S. Lewis, who wrote the children's literature series "Chronicles of Narnia."

Using Lewis is simple. A user enters keywords such as event participating brands, themes and seasons on the website and ad or marketing copy comprising headlines and text are produced within 10 seconds. For example, if a user inputs "Oera," a luxury skincare brand of South Korea's Handsome, and "spring makeup," the following phrase appears: "Awakening the skin on a spring day: Oera proposes a new skincare solution for skin that brightly blooms like flowers in the coming spring."

Phrases based on age group can be created by adjusting the tone of a phrase. For advertising copy geared for an art fair targeting 20-somethings, the result can be “Wanna be an insider? Come to Hyundai Department Store,” and if the target is those in their 50s, the phrase can be tweaked to “We invite everyone to a department store where art flows.”

Since early this month, Lewis underwent two weeks of internal testing, resulting in the slashing of time needed to produce draft copy from about two weeks to an average of three to four hours.

Write to Jeong-Cheol Bae at bjc@hankyung.com