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 s, 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.