China’s short drama industry has crossed a threshold that would have seemed unthinkable eighteen months ago. In the first quarter of 2026, roughly 128,000 short dramas hit Chinese platforms — three times the number published in all of 2025 combined. And according to the China Netcasting Services Association, 95 percent of them were AI-generated. Not AI-assisted. AI-generated.
The economics explain the speed of the shift. Tsinghua University professor Shen Yang told the Financial Times that one minute of AI video now costs between $90 and $120 — about a tenth of what a human production used to run. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 kicked off the current wave, and the newer Seedance 2.5 and Wan 3.0 models have pushed quality to the point where audiences apparently aren’t complaining loudly enough to matter.
The human cost is already visible in labor disputes. Lawyers report AI-related employment conflicts have climbed steadily over the past two to three years. Some performers describe being asked to “distil” their voice and likeness into AI tools — and then being let go once the digital double was trained. The industry directly employs 690,000 people, with another 15 million listing livestreaming as their primary income. That’s a lot of livelihoods tied to a technology that now undercuts them by 90 percent on cost.
What’s striking is how fast this flipped. The previous generation of AI video tools produced clips measured in seconds with obvious artifacts. Now entire drama series are being produced, published, and consumed at scale. The question isn’t whether AI can replace performers — it demonstrably can in this format. The question is whether Chinese regulators, who’ve historically stepped in when labor displacement threatened social stability, will treat this differently than past automation waves. So far, the silence is notable.
