Malaysia’s content creators battle AI abuse as deepfakes, scam ads spread online

They shared the view at the Freedom Film Network’s second International Conference on Film & Society in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, where creators, researchers and advocates from across Southeast Asia gathered under the theme “Cultivating Artistic Freedom in a Volatile World”.

Melissa Lim Shi Hui, a lawyer and legal fellow at Sinar Project who is building a public case database of creators whose works, images and likenesses have been misused through AI, said at the event that many creators had become newly vulnerable because they now had little choice but to put themselves online to make a living.

“We do need to use social media for our business, for our rice bowl,” she said, arguing that AI had intensified old harms rather than created entirely new ones. “What tech does … is that it actually amplifies the problems or the values that we already have.”

She pointed to a case involving a Malaysian cosplayer whose publicly shared photos were allegedly scraped from social media, altered with generative AI into fake nude images and then sold online. Lim said the victim later lodged a police report but still faced online abuse and stigma after coming forward.

She also cited the case of food entrepreneur and content creator Khairul Aming, whose recognisable video style, likeness and cloned voice were used in a fake advertisement asking viewers to buy a product to help him recover from flood damage at his factory.