Entertainment: Built-in Compliance

Gu Ruoping, an equity partner and management committee member at Dowway & Partners, believes the changes AI is bringing to entertainment law are being driven by the production side of the industry. Established areas of demand are shrinking while new ones emerge, requiring lawyers to recognise the shift and adapt their services.

Gu compares this with the "Jevons paradox" in economics: more efficient steam engines increased coal consumption because lower costs created greater demand. AI may follow a similar pattern. As AI products take over basic contract review and case research, demand for that work may fall, but a lawyer’s judgement, willingness to accept responsibility and strategic thinking remain impossible to replace.

The micro-drama industry offers the clearest example. AI is moving from a supporting tool to a means of producing content, sharply reducing costs and production times. The rapid growth in supply is also intensifying copyright and compliance questions. How should authorship be determined when scripts are largely AI-generated? Could AI-generated sets or props infringe existing rights? And where should the boundary lie when AI is used to capture or mimic an actor’s likeness and voice for a virtual character or dubbing?

A deeper change is taking place in the lawyer-client relationship. Entertainment lawyers traditionally played a remedial role, becoming involved after problems arose. Today, clients are often ahead of the curve in adopting AI but unclear about the compliance boundaries. Lawyers must move from "come to me once there's a problem" to helping clients "pave the road before the project even begins". Building compliance into a project from the outset is becoming a core part of the entertainment lawyer’s value.

The more deeply she uses AI, Gu says, the more clearly she sees its limits. Having worked through an entire AI film-production process herself, she has firsthand experience of where AI is prone to "hallucinate". Material that appears original may carry infringement risk, while contract clauses that seem internally consistent may not stand up legally. Entertainment lawyers must therefore move beyond traditional clause-by-clause review, tracing the copyright chain of AI-generated material and checking whether the sources of training data meet legal requirements.

Data security is the first red line. Entertainment-law work often involves unreleased projects, artist contracts and confidential commercial negotiations, where a leak could cause irreversible damage. General-purpose AI also struggles to understand the industry’s complex web of interests. Tensions between producers and platforms, investors’ demands, directors’ influence, actors’ schedules and commercial value, and the effect of public opinion on a project all shape how a contract should be revised. Ultimately, entertainment lawyers provide more than legal advice. They offer judgement informed by industry dynamics, competing interests and reputational risk. AI can speed up information processing, but the real value still lies in lawyers’ knowledge of the industry and their ability to manage complex relationships.