The World Danced ‘Storm’ With AI. A Korean Deputy Mayor Danced It With His Body

Featured photo: Punggi ginseng, the Yeongju specialty the officials were promoting. Photo: Eugene Kim / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5.

The “Storm challenge” that swept social media worldwide this fall was a game of swapping people’s faces in with AI. The city of Yeongju in North Gyeongsang Province did the same dance without AI: Deputy Mayor Eom Tae-hyun and about 60 senior officials danced it themselves, and it pulled in 2.16 million views on YouTube alone. Korean internet users gave the video a name: not “AI” but ei-eoreun, a pun that turns “A.I.” into “A grown-up.”

The ‘Storm challenge’ was a game of erasing people

The original is the music video for “STORM” by French music project GENER8ION and Swedish rapper Yung Lean (also listed as “STORM II”). Released in April, it became famous for its choreography: a crowd in expressionless uniforms swaying as one body (The FADER, April 24, 2026). The original has 42.97 million views on YouTube (checked October 31), and at the MTV VMAs in September the video was recreated live on stage. The New York Times described it as “a mesmerizing dance video viewed hundreds of millions of times” (October 17, 2026).

What went viral wasn’t the original but the copies. “Genjutsu,” released in late August by AI video company Higgsfield, keeps the original’s dance and camera moves and swaps out only the people. A 15-second clip costs about $5.20 (Kyunghyang Shinmun, October 24). So the dancers became dogs, became Elon Musk, became Kim Jong Un (Stereogum, citing Vulture).

Director Romain Gavras prepared the scene of 66 people dancing for two months and shot it about 15 times. As copies flooded in, he told Vulture he “felt sad thinking about the people who put so much effort into our video,” and that “trends like this make even good work look cheap” (Kyunghyang Shinmun, Stereogum). In Korea too, “Storm challenge” quickly came to mean an AI-generated video. Maeil Shinmun wrote that “most Storm parodies on social media have been made with AI.”

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Yeongju didn’t erase anyone

On September 29, a 50-second video went up on Yeongju’s official Instagram. Deputy Mayor Eom, in a white shirt and tie, bites into a root of Punggi ginseng and walks in among some 60 officials dressed in matching black. Once he takes the center of the formation, the dance begins, and a sign in the back row reads “Low on energy? Come to Punggi” (Korea Economic Daily, October 1). It was a promo for the Punggi Ginseng Festival (October 3–11).

Every performer was a senior official at grade 5 or above. They didn’t get costumes; they wore the black work uniforms they put on for wildfire emergency duty. The shoot was announced on the spot right after a senior staff meeting and wrapped in about 20 minutes, and Punggi-eup chief Kim Han-deuk said, “We didn’t practice at all beforehand” (Munhwa Ilbo).

The results came in numbers. The Instagram reel hit 160,000 views in 16 hours (Munhwa Ilbo) and passed 700,000 in two days, with 37,000 likes and 1,000 comments (Korea Economic Daily). That’s for a city of 90,000 people with 20,000 Instagram followers (Maeil Shinmun). The YouTube Shorts version has 2.16 million views and about 33,000 likes (checked October 31). On October 6, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post carried the story abroad in a video report: “Senior officials of a South Korean city create a ‘storm’ parodying Yung Lean’s viral music video” (cited by Munhwa Ilbo).

What commenters pointed to wasn’t the dancing skill. “It’s even more amazing that they didn’t make it with AI” (Korea Economic Daily), “The weirdly off beat is the killer point” (Munhwa Ilbo), and the most-shared line of all: “It’s not A.I., it’s A-grown-up” (Maeil Shinmun).

What got the applause was the opposite of ‘jjam-cheori’

In Korean workplaces, embarrassing or annoying jobs usually fall to the most junior person. It’s called jjam-cheori, from military slang for seniority, meaning dumping work on whoever has the least of it. It’s the same structure that puts young staffers in most local government promo videos (Munhwa Ilbo).

Yeongju’s video flipped that order. Maeil Shinmun wrote that it went viral “because it wasn’t made the jjam-cheori way, forced onto the youngest staff.” The comments agreed: “If they’d drafted young employees they might’ve been criticized, but using only the veterans shows they’ve got good instincts” (Maeil Shinmun), “A video that worked because it wasn’t young staff” (Korea Economic Daily). OBS News ran the headline “‘No young employees’ was a stroke of genius.”

Age wasn’t a weakness but the material. Lee Jae-hyung, head of Yeongju’s press support team, explained: “To promote ginseng, which symbolizes energy and vitality, we thought an older cast would suit it better than young officials” (Korea Economic Daily). Fifty seconds of middle-aged officials chewing ginseng and hanging on through an off beat became the very proof of “Low on energy? Come to Punggi.”

Now in Korea, deputy mayors dance ‘Storm’

A month later, Gangneung in Gangwon Province went the same way. Deputy Mayor Kim Man-ho and merchants of the Ponam Yongma street appeared in their own “STORM” parody, finished shooting on October 28, and the video promoting the street’s night market goes up on the city’s social media next week (Dong-A Ilbo, October 29; Yonhap, October 28). Daegu Ilbo titled a column “In a world overflowing with AI, sometimes I miss the clumsy real thing.”

The beat Gavras drilled into 66 dancers over two months, Yeongju’s 60 officials danced out of sync, unrehearsed, in 20 minutes. And people came back 2.16 million times to watch that off beat.

Sources

• The FADER, April 24, 2026: Yung Lean is pure chaos in “STORM”
• The New York Times, October 17, 2026
• Stereogum: Romain Gavras addresses slop copies of the “Storm” video (citing Vulture)
• Kyunghyang Shinmun, October 24, 2026
• Korea Economic Daily, October 1, 2026, Maeil Shinmun, October 1, 2026, Munhwa Ilbo (citing SCMP), OBS News
• Yonhap, October 28, 2026, Dong-A Ilbo, October 29, 2026, Daegu Ilbo column
• YouTube views and likes: Yeongju City official channel, GENER8ION official (checked October 31, 2026)