The Do IT First, Worry Later Award goes to Singapore’s AI showbiz pioneer Jack Neo

SINGAPORE – Film-maker Jack Neo is a trailblazer, and trailblazers do not become who they are by listening to critics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has many haters because critics see it as a way for the untalented to crank out slop. But for the local writer-director, where others saw junk, he saw opportunity.

That is why he gets this award: After a lengthy career as one of Singapore’s most flamed-on yet successful creators, he has not just become critic-proof, but also slop-proof.

Few were surprised when two of Neo’s major 2025 projects featured gobs of AI.

In his Chinese New Year film I Want To Be Boss, AI was instrumental in creating its nine songs. He wrote the lyrics, while AI generated the music and singing voices for all tracks except the final number.

To mark the nation’s 60th birthday in August,

he released a music video

that used AI to recreate the voice and image of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Neo is part of a global trend. The year 2025 will be known as the year AI went mainstream. AI country singer Breaking Rust has 2.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, while AI rock band The Velvet Sundown’s song Dust On The Wind has chalked up more than 3.5 million listens.

Like the AI bands on Spotify, Neo has received flak, especially for the SG60 video, which many found disrespectful to the former leader. But at this stage of Neo’s career, getting flamed is just another Tuesday for him.

You name it, he has been accused of it: Misogyny and fat-shaming in the military comedy Ah Girls Go Army (2022), and asking actors to play racist stereotypes for military comedy Ah Boys To Men 4 (2017). Loudest of all are complaints about him giving sponsored products so much screen time that they feel like actual characters.

But Neo’s commercial instincts are rarely wrong. I Want To Be Boss earned a combined $2 million at the Singapore and Malaysia box office. Ah Girls Go Army was hated by critics, but it made over $2 million at the Singapore box office and spawned a sequel, Ah Girls Go Army Again (2022).

Whether one thinks he is a hack or cheeky rule-breaker thumbing his nose at the woke mob, his success speaks for itself. Journalists who have spoken with Neo sense that he embraces AI because he loves results more than the process. AI is the broom that lets Neo sweep away the gatekeepers – namely, musicians and digital artists.

This award goes to Neo for embodying, perhaps more than anyone in Singapore, the Silicon Valley motto of “move fast and break things”. The more things he breaks, it seems, the more successful he becomes. There is a lesson in that for all of us.