When Generative AI came into our lives, it was already met with resistance, especially from the creative community.
Painters, graphic designers, musicians, and other types of creatives have shared countless times AI-generated content actually draws material from existing artwork. This includes their own artwork that has already been published online. Even if it wasn’t, many were not happy with the idea of a computer taking artwork from human artists and fusing it together to make “art”.
This has not stopped Malaysians from using AI art, especially on an administrative level.
The National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS) recently posted about a new product by the AI company: Morphyx Cinema Studio (MCS).
According to the post, MCS was launched at Aurum Theatre in The Exhange TRX in Kuala Lumpur.
“The MCS ecosystem leverages multimodal AI technology and visual generation models such as Happy Horse and Wan to support cinematic visual creation, scene consistency and more structured character animation development,” said the national film corporation.
During the launch, FINAS Chief Executive Officer Dato’ Azmir Saifuddin Mutalib shared his perspective and support for the continued growth of Malaysia’s creative and filmmaking ecosystem.
Meanwhile, Founder and Creative Tech Director of Morphyx.io Sham Yunus also shared the creative vision, direction and possibilities behind MCS at the launch event.
Guests at the launch were presented with a showcase of short “films” (if one can call them that) produced through MCS.
As expected, the responses were less than savoury.
Some also highlighted that The Academy Awards would automatically disqualify films that employ the use of AI.
“Film plus AI? How will Road To Oscars be possible now? Does FINAS understand that one of the conditions for a film to be nominated for an Oscar says AI cannot be used?” said one user on Threads, who reshared a post of FINAS promoting MCS which has since been taken down due to overwhelming criticism.
This is not the first time AI-generated art has garnered criticism in Malaysia. A video promoting Citrawarna 2026 uploaded on Instagram by Tourism Malaysia earlier this year generously employed generative AI and received major backlash from the public for not hiring local talents to do the job. The video has since been removed from its social media accounts.
In February, the Music Authors’ Copyright Protection (MACP) Berhad published official guidelines on the use of AI in creative work. This came after an AI-generated cover of a 1999 song by Anis Suraya topped Apple’s iTunes charts.
Many are rightfully against AI in the arts. After all, many have stated how arts discuss the human in the humanities. This author says to support your local artist, go to your nearby cinema, read a book, just about anything to support the arts in Malaysia.
