Overview
The YouTube video “ChatGPT로 만든 이모티콘, 진짜 카톡에 판매 가능할까?🤔” walks through something most AI-emoji threads gloss over: KakaoTalk has restricted emoji submissions that use AI-generated images directly since September 2023. Yet creators continue to ship AI-assisted emojis successfully. The reason is a specific workflow that uses AI for ideation and a manual editing step for the actual image — and that distinction is officially recognized as creative enough to pass review.
Why This Matters
Direct AI-to-emoji pipelines are intuitive. The AI writes dialogue, the AI draws the character, the creator uploads. The official KakaoTalk policy, as quoted by the Emoji Studio in the video: “We are restricting entry for emojis using AI-generated content, after reviewing copyright and creativity questions about the images.” (카카오 이모티콘 스튜디오 공식 입장)
Two caveats make this workable:
- Review is private. KakaoTalk declined to describe how they detect AI-generated content. “We do not publicly disclose the review procedure.” (이모티콘 심사 절차 관련해서는 외부에 공개하지 않고 있다.)
- AI-as-tool is accepted. Creators using AI for concept + manual editing for delivery are passing. The line is creativity demonstrable in the final artifact.
The Three-Step Workflow
Step 1: ChatGPT for Concept
ChatGPT isn’t drawing; it’s scripting. The video’s example prompt:
“말을 하는 귀여운 햄스터 캐릭터가 혼잣말처럼 말하는 열 가지 짧은 문장을 만들어 줘.” “Make 10 short monologue-style lines for a cute talking hamster character.”
The model returns lines like:
- “애구 또 간식 숨겨 놨는데 어디더라?”
- “햇살 좋다. 나 오늘 아무것도 안 할 거야.”
These read as natural emoji dialogue. The more detail you front-load — character personality, world context, speech pattern — the better the lines scale. ChatGPT is doing what it’s best at: producing narrative voice.
Step 2: Image Model for Draft
With the concept locked, Midjourney / DALL-E / Bing Image Creator produce the draft images. The prompt pattern:
“A cute chubby brown hamster with an angry face, arms crossed, LINE emoji style.”
Tip from the video: don’t produce one image. Plan a 24-emotion set first, then batch-prompt — angry, sad, happy, surprised, sleepy, hungry, curious, excited, bored, embarrassed, etc. Emoji sets sell on emotional range, not on individual image quality.
Step 3: Manual Editing (The Creativity Step)
This is the step that matters for review. The video’s direct advice: “AI가 생성한 이미지 그대로는 쓸 수 없습니다.” AI-generated images cannot be used as-is.
The editing that establishes creativity:
- Redraw or trace in Clip Studio Paint / Photoshop. A hand-redrawn version of an AI reference is clearly creator work.
- Harmonize style across 24 images. AI outputs drift between images — unifying them into a visually consistent set is substantive creative work.
- Adjust outlines, colors, proportions. Match them to KakaoTalk’s visibility guidelines (thick outlines, clear shapes at small sizes).
After editing, the submission goes through KakaoTalk Emoji Studio’s standard review.
The Revenue Math
KakaoTalk’s revenue structure:
- Sale price: ₩2,500 per paid emoji set.
- Creator share: roughly 35–40%. Call it ₩1,000 per set sold.
- 1,000 sets sold = ~₩1M in creator revenue.
The video notes that hobby creators frequently earn ~₩50,000/mo as supplemental income. The upside scales non-linearly — a hit set with SNS exposure hits the store’s popularity ranking, which feeds more sales, which pushes the ranking higher. The distribution is a long tail with real prizes for the top 1%.
What Review Actually Catches
The video lists KakaoTalk’s review axes:
- World coherence (세상도 체크) — does the emoji fit a recognizable character world?
- Speech bubble position and opacity — technical compliance.
- Text expression — is the dialogue natural?
- Copyright — the big one. AI-generated images without creator modification fall here.
Rejection rates for “obvious AI output” have risen since 2023-09. The creators passing are, empirically, the ones putting the editing step in.
The Policy Drift
A specific detail from the video worth flagging: “from the second half of 2024, review criteria will include planning-centered standards regardless of AI use.” If a set has a clear concept, a character with a story, and expresses emotion well, it’s more likely to pass even if AI was part of the workflow. The trajectory is from “AI is a disqualifier” toward “AI is neutral; creativity is the bar.”
Insights
The KakaoTalk situation is a concrete case of the broader AI-content policy evolution: platforms that banned AI outputs in 2023 are moving toward “AI-as-tool is fine; undisguised AI output is not.” For a creator using ChatGPT + a drawing tool, the workflow is survivable and even profitable — but the manual editing step is not optional. It’s the step that converts an AI draft into a legally and reviewably creator-owned work. The parallel for the emoji-generation tool space (PopCon, Amoji) is that reaching KakaoTalk at scale requires the output to be more than a direct AI render — either by adding a meaningful edit pass in-product or by positioning as an ideation tool rather than a finished-emoji tool. LINE, for now, is the friendlier first market; KakaoTalk follows once the post-processing story is mature.