This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 10, 2026 - August 16, 2026

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping our everyday experiences, changing the music we listen to, the content we scroll through and the images and videos that fill our feeds. For content creators, the impact is immediate, as questions around ownership, recognition and income are hitting close to home.

For Malaysia and many other jurisdictions, this creates a dual challenge: how do we embrace AI as a driver of growth and innovation while ensuring the people behind the work continue to be recognised and fairly rewarded?

A recent Wong & Partners report, Balancing Progress and Protection: Navigating Malaysia’s Legal Landscape for AI Risks, finds that Malaysia already operates with a principles-based legal framework designed to adapt as technology evolves.

This includes laws covering copyright, data protection, consumer protection and platform governance, which form a strong foundation to respond to new risks, including those brought about by AI.

But one area where the law is coming under increasing pressure is copyright. Malaysia’s framework is built around human authorship and originality, but AI-generated works are testing these definitions, creating uncertainty over ownership, attribution and compensation.

If an AI system helps produce a song, image or article, questions quickly arise over who owns the work, who should be credited, whether existing copyrighted works can be used to train AI systems and ultimately who should benefit from the value created.

While this may sound technical, the impact is deeply personal. According to the Department of Statistics, Malaysia’s creative economy contributed 6.8% of gross domestic product (RM130.7 billion) in 2024 and employs more than 760,000 people. Behind these numbers are musicians, writers, designers and creators whose livelihoods depend on a system that continues to recognise and reward human creativity.

Policymakers are navigating a careful balancing act, from the data used to train AI systems to the content they generate and, most importantly, who owns that content, who should be credited for it and how its value should be shared.

These questions affect different groups in different ways. Training data is primarily a concern for developers and rights holders while AI-generated content raises separate issues for creators, platforms and everyday users.

There is no global consensus on the best way forward as different governments are developing their own approaches while closely monitoring how the technology continues to evolve. For example, the European Union allows rights holders to reserve their works from certain text and data mining uses for AI training while Singapore’s Copyright Act provides exceptions for computational data analysis under specified conditions to support innovation.

Some are exploring how existing principles — such as exceptions for research, analysis and computational use — should apply when considering whether the use of copyrighted works to train AI systems should be treated differently from how people consume creative works and what safeguards can give creators meaningful choice over how their work is used.

Some approaches place greater emphasis on protecting rights holders while others prioritise enabling AI development.

In Malaysia, the challenge is finding an approach that supports technological and economic advancement while continuing to recognise and safeguard the rights of creators.

Attempting to address all of this through a single, comprehensive framework risks overlooking important nuances. An overly rigid approach may limit flexibility as both the technology and its applications continue to develop.

This is where principles such as proportionality and technology neutrality become important. In practice, this means regulating the risks AI creates rather than the technology itself and tailoring policy responses according to the level of risk, instead of applying the same rules to every AI use case.

At present, Malaysia’s legal framework is based on the principle that creativity should be human-led, which helps protect the rights of creators.

Rather than rewriting the rules from scratch, Malaysia has an opportunity to build on this foundation to provide greater clarity in areas such as ownership and attribution while allowing more time, public discussion and practical experience to guide decisions on more complex issues.

Clarifying ownership and attribution need not restrict how creators choose to use AI in developing their work. Instead, the aim should be to protect human creative contributions while preserving the flexibility to use AI as a tool in the creative process.

Malaysia appears to be taking this approach by building on existing legal and governance frameworks and introducing targeted updates to address emerging AI-related risks.

Initiatives such as the National Guidelines on AI Governance and Ethics and discussions on a proposed AI Governance Bill provide a foundation for responsible AI adoption. They also reflect a recognition that emerging AI risks can often be addressed by strengthening and complementing existing legal and governance frameworks rather than replacing them.

This reflects an important principle: Not every technological development requires an entirely new rule book. Existing laws, institutions and courts can continue to address new questions as they arise, providing flexibility while broader regulatory approaches continue to evolve.

It is easy to frame this as AI versus artists but that misses the bigger picture.

AI can help creators work faster, experiment more and reach new audiences. The priority should be on ensuring that the rules governing it can evolve sufficiently to provide creators confidence, encourage innovation and maintain public trust.

Malaysia’s existing legal foundations mean it is well placed to do exactly that — by evolving what already works rather than starting over.

Lih Shiun Goh is the managing director of Asia Tech Alliance and Serene Kan is a partner (technology) at Wong & Partners, member firm of Baker McKenzie International

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