Protecting Human Creativity from AI’s Grip (Haochen Sun Profiled in HKU Bulletin)

"Protecting Human Creativity from AI’s Grip"

Haochen Sun

HKU Bulletin
Published in May 2026

Professor Haochen Sun of the Faculty of Law has been looking at the threats to human creativity from AI, and possible legal and ethical remedies.

Every big AI platform has faced lawsuits for using existing creative works to train their models without permission or compensation, with plaintiffs ranging from Hollywood studios to media outlets to individual artists and authors. For Professor Haochen Sun, Founding Director of HKU’s Programme on Artificial Intelligence and the Law and an expert in technology law and policy, this use of creative works is a legal and ethical problem for both creators and society.

“These works are the foundation of our human civilisation. They embody human thought, from philosophy to literature, music and art, and they should be highly valued. When they’re used in the AI training process, it demeans their value by transforming them into tokens. What would be the implications, then, for the future of human creativity?” he asked.

Using content without permission is problematic on several fronts, he said. First, whoever controls the inputs to the AI training process can shape how AI develops and makes decisions, so the creators who provide that input could be excluded.

Second, there is the possibility that copyright protection could extend to AI-generated material, knowingly or not. While most jurisdictions do not allow this (apart from one judge in the Chinese Mainland who decided that an AI prompt was creative input), Professor Sun believes there is little to stop humans from presenting AI content as their own.

“It’s so easy to conceal this content and pretend it was made by a human,” he said. “I can foresee that an enormous amount of AI-generated content, ranging from text answers to images and videos, could end up being protected by copyright law because the threshold as the law stands – called the ‘originality requirement’ – is extremely low.”

In awe of AI

In such a scenario, ‘AI copyright trolls’ may be incited to launch lawsuits to see what they could extract. Most importantly, content flows to the public domain would be restricted, ultimately harming human creativity......

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