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Opinion
The rules we make around artificial intelligence and creative work today will define what the city’s culture and economy look like tomorrow
3-MIN READ3-MIN Adam Au is the general counsel at a multinational corporation.
The Furious, Hong Kong’s
latest action flick, is crushing it on Rotten Tomatoes and has garnered critical acclaim abroad – proof of what human-centric filmmaking can still deliver in today’s market. But before we rush to hail the return of Hong Kong cinema, a new breed of drama factory is quietly generating content at a velocity no human team could ever match.
In mainland China,
micro dramasgenerated by artificial intelligence (AI) have turned the industry upside down. A production schedule that once demanded months from a full crew can be compressed into weeks by a handful of people. For the media platforms, this is a gold rush. For artists, it’s a nightmare.This shift isn’t confined to dramas. The ubiquity of AI-generated content is becoming impossible to ignore. We face a barrage of AI-created advertisements, and official bodies like the Correctional Services Department are venturing into these new waters, as evidenced by the
controversial anti-drug video.When content becomes a high-volume, low-cost commodity produced by algorithms, how much space remains for human ingenuity?
In the pre-AI era, the pact was clear: writers, directors and actors shared the risks and rewards, and credits were a public record of accountability. Generative AI upended this. Someone who knows nothing about movie production can feed prompts into a system trained on the statistical echoes of past work to generate a storyline and visuals. But the results can hardly be described as original. They are, at best, pastiches.
Hong Kong has long promoted itself as a city that cherishes creativity and intellectual property. Tourists make pilgrimages to see the
police stationmade famous byInfernal Affairsor to stand where theKowloon Walled Cityonce stood, inspired by. They don’t come for a green screen. This cultural cachet was built by real creators and their unique stories. To cede this ground to algorithmic content mills would be an erosion of our collective identity.Twilight of the Warriors: Walled InAdvertisement
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