Hong Kong marketers looking to adopt generative AI tools face multiple challenges, such as copyright and legal risks

Hong Kong marketers looking to make use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools say that legal, privacy and copyright concerns remain the main obstacles to increased adoption amid ongoing hype around the technology.

“It’s easy to see GPT become so popular. It’s hard to understand GPT and it’s also really hard to adopt it into your workflow,” Herbert Chia, chairman of the data governance steering committee at the government-backed Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, said on Tuesday at an advertising industry conference organised by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Hong Kong.

Chia, former head of the data committee and group vice-president at Alibaba Group Holding between 2010 and 2016, was referring to the large language models (LLMs) developed by US start-up OpenAI, whose viral chatbot ChatGPT took the world by storm following its release last year.

Neither ChatGPT nor Google’s new chatbot rival Bard are directly accessible in Hong Kong. The absence of official support for such popular generative AI tools has prompted fears that the city’s efforts to position itself as a super connector and international financial centre could be undermined.

But Hong Kong’s internet users have stayed on top of the trend by using third-party service providers. Poe, a chatbot aggregator developed by Q&A platform Quora, is one of the most popular platforms for the city’s chatbot users with 48.9 per cent of Poe’s global users based in Hong Kong, according to data published by analytics firm Measurable AI.

Businesses in the city, though, find that adoption of popular AI tools is still a challenge, with copyright concerns and legal and privacy risks.