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.
