Motif Technologies, in collaboration with the National Heritage Administration and the Korea Heritage Foundation, is developing a "Korean-style multimodal AI."

Motif Technologies (CEO Lim Jeong-hwan), a company specializing in AI model development, is collaborating with the National Heritage Administration (Director Heo Min) and the National Heritage Promotion Institute (Director Lee Gwi-young) to begin developing multimodal AI technology based on Korea's national heritage.

This project is part of the "2025 Private Cloud-Based AI and Data Lake Utilization Support Project," hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Intelligence Service (NIA). This government-wide digital transformation initiative aims to aggregate and process national heritage data and support data analysis and service development based on this data. Motif Technologies will participate as the private sector representative in this project, forming a consortium with the National Heritage Administration and the National Heritage Promotion Agency.

The core of the project is the development of an image-generating foundation model that reflects the identity and symbolism of national heritage. Specifically, the goal is to build a multimodal AI service utilizing Text-to-Image (T2I) technology, which converts input sentences into images, and to make this service publicly available for anyone to utilize.

To this end, the National Heritage Administration and the National Heritage Promotion Institute plan to collect and refine data across three categories—cultural heritage, natural heritage, and intangible heritage—and process them into high-quality training data. Motif Technologies will refine this data by linking it to Korean-specific text data, reflecting cultural contexts such as cultural heritage commentary and historical expressions. The resulting model will be trained to more accurately generate traditional Korean images and cultural expressions.

The ultimately developed multimodal AI chatbot service will be provided in API format so that it can be utilized by general users, including private companies and individual creators. Furthermore, it will be linked to existing digital platforms, such as the National Heritage Digital Service and the National Heritage Channel, to increase public accessibility and usability.

Lim Jeong-hwan, CEO of Motif Technologies, said, “With Korea’s first Korean-style image generation foundation model trained on traditional images, we can expect not only improved expression of Korean images but also increased efficiency in producing related content.”

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