When great writing is behind great AI
‘By re-righting history, we reignited brand love for Cathay’
Christopher Lee, CCO of Leo HK, tells the story behind how the agency created the pioneering AI-assisted Re-righting History
As the official airline sponsor of the China Hong Kong Paralympic Committee, Cathay wanted to leverage the 2024 Paralympics to improve brand affinity within its home market, returning the brand to its cherished place in Hong Kongers' hearts.
The problem? Trailblazing achievements of Hong Kong’s Paralympians have long been neglected, and barely recorded – in fact, broadcast networks in Hong Kong first aired the Paralympics only a few years ago in 2021.
We wondered if we could right history by using AI to recreate never-before-seen medal-winning moments. By making people aware of how little attention they had paid to Hong Kong’s most successful Paralympians in the past, we ignited their desire to make up for this wrongdoing – right now.
Challenges
In Hong Kong, the Olympics is almost a religion. When Li Lai Shan won the city’s ‘first’ Olympic gold medal in 1996, it showed that even a small city could beat Goliaths. Ask any Hong Konger to recite the city’s 13 Olympic medal wins… they can easily do so. Recent Olympic fencing and swimming wins have galvanised the city.
Conversely, ask Hong Kongers how many Paralympic medals the city has won, and they’ll most likely come up blank. This is despite the fact that Hong Kong has won an astonishing 139 Paralympic medals. Barely anyone knows… because they never aired. As Hong Kong Free Press reports, TV stations “did not see the value in buying the license rights for the Paralympics”.
This brings us to our first challenge: As airline partner, Cathay wanted to honour the grit, passion, and sheer talent of our home city’s Paralympics team. But how could it achieve this if no one was watching?
To raise awareness of legendary Paralympians, we decided to use Hong Kongers’ love of medal-winning highlights to create a Trojan horse: a compilation of never-before-seen medal-winning moments that would inspire Hong Kongers to re-right history.
This led us to our second challenge. Without an archive of televised footage or photographs, could we use AI to recreate history? Historically, the Paralympics have been covered so little in Hong Kong that their actual local history doesn’t exist. We would need to use AI to fill the gap.
From here, we discovered our third – and biggest – hurdle. AI is biased against people with disabilities. When prompted to generate disabled athletes, AI was simply not sophisticated enough to do so authentically. We realised that it would require countless prompts and endless finessing to create images that authentically reflect the true stories of past Paralympians.
Recreating lost moments with AI
With no televised footage of Paralympian highlights from the past four decades, we knew we’d have to regenerate synthetic visuals using AI. We started by interviewing Hong Kong’s former Paralympic athletes to learn their stories, while collating scarce keepsakes and photos to make up for the lack of source material.
Armed with this data, we began generating images using a combination of Adobe Firefly and Leonardo AI, before manually composing and retouching using conventional methods with Photoshop.
We soon realized AI was not very good at portraying people with disabilities, particularly athletes. AI models were simply not being trained with enough high-quality data about people with disabilities. For every 100 images generated, only 10% were workable. Even then, they required constant iterations to achieve the craft and authenticity required. The resulting images were then used to create videos using Runway Gen-3 Alpha, which excels at generating expressive human actions, gestures, and emotions, unlocking storytelling opportunities.
To overcome AI’s disability bias, we had to constantly iterate and fine tune digitally in order to create a launch film that’s as close-to-reality as possible. The film puts three pioneering Paralympians in the spotlight: Cho Ping, Benny Cheung and Ko Chi Kin.
Blending AI with human storytelling
This wasn’t about jumping on the AI bandwagon, or using AI to drive efficiency. Without AI, our idea simply was not possible.
Equipped only with the memories and recollections of Paralympians and their anecdotes, with just weeks to deliver perfectly crafted content, we would never have been able to recreate history – at scale and at speed – without the latest AI technologies.
To us, ‘Re-righting History’ was more than a film, but a Trojan horse to get Hong Kongers to act and support our Paralympians now.
We started by challenging locals with a seemingly easy question on Cathay’s social channels: “Was our first Gold medal won in 1996?”
We then surprised Hong Kongers by revealing that it wasn’t, it was actually won at the 1984 Paralympic Games. We invited different generations of Paralympians to retell their medal-winning moments, featuring their highlights as a video compilation.
Then came the second twist. We revealed that all the moments they had just seen were fabrications. They were never recorded or broadcast, so you can’t find them online, through search or via media coverage – a reveal so startling, our video immediately went viral.
We then left our audience with a plea: We’ve already missed 40 golds, 39 silvers, 52 bronze and countless other moments. Let’s not miss the 2024 Paralympics. Because it’s never too late to learn our history and cheer on our Paralympians in Paris.
