Asian Agencies Face AI Infringement Risk as Adoption Accelerates
Springboards' experimental campaign exposes how generative AI tools push agencies toward copyright infringement and creative homogenization across APAC markets.
Springboards, a creative AI platform serving over 200 agencies worldwide, launched "The Dangers of AI" campaign on June 10, 2025, using experimental ad recreation to demonstrate copyright infringement risks and creative homogenization facing Asian agencies adopting generative AI tools.
Experimental Campaign Exposes Pattern Collapse
The campaign deliberately recreated an existing advertisement using AI models to show how quickly these systems drift into copyright infringement. Springboards found that generative AI produces finished advertising work within minutes but frequently converges on similar creative outputs, even with varied prompts.
Mission Media
"We're dramatizing the problem of large models sending everyone to the same place by deliberately using a technique that exposes how easily they drift into infringement," said Pip Bingemann, CEO and Co-Founder of Springboards. The company acknowledged the irony of using AI to expose AI's limitations but emphasized making these risks visible as agencies adopt the technology for concepting, copywriting, and image generation.
Amy Tucker, Co-Founder, noted the models "narrow creative possibilities as much as they expand them," positioning Springboards' platform as "an enabler, not the final answer" that preserves human taste and judgment while providing creative variation.
Legal Risks Mount Across Asia-Pacific
The campaign arrives as Asia-Pacific faces escalating copyright litigation and fragmented intellectual property frameworks. In 2025, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. sued Chinese AI firm Minimax for training models on copyrighted works including Star Wars and The Simpsons. Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi newspapers filed suit against Perplexity in August 2025 over unauthorized content scraping.
Southeast Asian intellectual property laws require human authorship for copyright protection, leaving AI-generated advertising content legally unprotected and exposing agencies to liability. Statutory damages reach $150,000 per infringed work across APAC markets, with ignorance offering no legal defense.
China's 2023 Interim Measures mandate lawful training data, forcing agencies to use licensed platforms to avoid infringement. India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology advisory from March 2024 requires AI platforms to block unlawful content, further complicating commercial advertising use.
Regional Industry Response
"Legal agreements between platforms, brands, and agencies are essential so that everyone's rights and responsibilities are clear," said Michael Titshall, CEO of RGA APAC, reflecting growing regional caution around generative AI adoption despite adoption pressure.
ASEAN has proposed consensus-based AI frameworks to protect creators from unlicensed training, addressing regional intellectual property ambiguity. China's Beijing Internet Court ruled in 2023 that AI-generated works receive copyright protection only with substantial human creative input, establishing precedent for human involvement requirements.
Platform Differentiation Strategy
Founded by Bingemann, Tucker, and Kieran Browne, Springboards raised $5 million in seed funding and claims its platform generates 10 to 30 times more idea diversity than generic models like OpenAI and Gemini. The company designs tools specifically around creative thinking workflows rather than general-purpose applications.
Springboards plans additional experiment-led work examining how generative systems shape creative outcomes in advertising as the industry navigates tensions between AI adoption and legal compliance.
Want to stay up-to-date on the stories shaping Asia's media, marketing, and comms industry? Subscribe to Mission Media for exclusive insights, campaign deep-dives, and actionable intel.
