Before we hail Hong Kong cinema’s return, let’s ensure its survival

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 dramas generated 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 station made famous by Infernal Affairs or to stand where the Kowloon Walled City once stood, inspired by Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. 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. Scams are another troubling aspect. Fraudsters have deployed live agents and AI-driven scripts to impersonate companies, while other schemes use deepfake videos. The illusion is chillingly effective. Is this just an ingenious application of technology or a harbinger of a future where trust is quietly being dismantled? When an AI-generated image upsets an original creator, liability quickly escalates into legal conflict. On paper, Hong Kong’s copyright law is ready, with a provision for “computer-generated works” and assigns authorship to those who undertake the “arrangements necessary for the creation of the work”. In the context of generative AI, however, the definition of “arrangements” dissolves into a quagmire of legal complexity. While liability could cascade up the chain to the developer, in practice, it frequently lands on the end user. Furthermore, when human involvement is reduced to merely choosing from AI-produced options, should the law really afford that output the same standing as a work of traditional authorship? Some will contend that this is merely another rotation of the technological wheel, like when the camera first posed a threat to the painter’s brush. But that’s a sloppy comparison. The world moved at a much slower pace then. Anyone could easily tell a photograph from a painting. But AI is an impersonator. It can produce fakes so believable they undermine the very notion of authenticity. The public is left to deal with the consequences when these technological shock waves ripple through our creative industries before we can quantify the impact. To navigate this ambiguity, many resort to contracts. But while powerful tech companies can negotiate favourable terms, individual creators are faced with take-it-or-leave-it offers, or very little room to push back. This is stirring resistance: earlier this year, more than 180 Hong Kong voice actors, including the Cantonese voice behind Doraemon’s Shizuka, jointly declared their opposition to having their voices scraped for AI training without consent. But even if they win, it may prove a pyrrhic victory. Expecting a large language model to unlearn what it has absorbed is like trying to un-ring a bell. Much of the public discourse on AI tends to emphasise innovation and economic competitiveness. Yet for the arts, a more profound question looms: what kinds of work and responsibility should our laws recognise? If we want to protect and reward individual creators, our approach must be more nuanced than simply letting the algorithms fall where they may. We can start by reformulating copyright protections for AI-assisted works, mandating transparency in training models and policing the policy fine print that quietly strips creators of their rights. The choices we make now will determine whether we can create more films like The Furious. That film’s success was achievable only through the raw dedication of actors, directors and crew, who delivered real stunts, real sweat and genuine creative gambles. Like the best of our cinema, it is a mixed production, drawing talent from around the world, the kind of cross-border human collaboration no prompt can replicate. For decades, our most significant cultural exports have always been the fruit of this kind of human ingenuity and commitment. The future of drama, and creative art more broadly, should not belong to those who reject technology, nor to those who surrender to it, but to those who wield the technology and blend it with genuine, human storytelling. The rules we design around AI and creative work today will define what the city’s culture and economy will be like tomorrow.

Before we hail Hong Kong cinema’s return, let’s ensure its survival

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The rules we make around artificial intelligence and creative work today will define what the city’s culture and economy look like tomorrow

The rules we make around artificial intelligence and creative work today will define what the city’s culture and economy look like tomorrow