AI Revolutionizes Chinese Short Dramas

A Captivating, Yet Artificial Scene

In a dimly lit room, a dramatic scene unfolds: a terrified young woman is thrown onto a bed by a towering man. Fiery vines wrap around her, merging with her skin, while a dragon tattoo appears on her chest. "Two months," the man says. "Give me an heir, or I will devour you." This scene, taken from Carrying the Dragon King’s Baby, is one of many examples of short Chinese dramas flooding platforms like DramaWave and ReelShort. What stands out in this production is its unusual visual aspect, oscillating between cinema and video game cinematics. This impression is due to the fact that this drama is entirely AI-generated, with no direct human intervention.

The Rapid Rise of Short Dramas

Since their emergence in 2018, Chinese short dramas have experienced exponential growth. These mini-series, designed for consumption on smartphones, feature episodes lasting one to two minutes, allowing viewers to finish an entire series in under an hour. This format is ideal for continuous scrolling, offering plots rich in emotions and twists. By 2024, the short drama market in China reached an impressive revenue of $6.9 billion, surpassing the annual box office earnings for the first time.

The films are designed for endless scrolling, filled with emotional confrontations and melodramatic twists. The growth of this trend is fueled by apps that bombard TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook with cliffhanger-rich advertisements, designed to entice viewers into purchasing subscriptions.

A Global Expansion

Since 2022, Chinese short drama companies have begun to expand internationally. They translate their local successes and produce adapted series with local actors to reach a global audience. Short drama apps have accumulated nearly one billion downloads worldwide, with the United States accounting for about 50% of the revenue, according to DataEye.

The AI Revolution in Production

The short drama industry is undergoing a transformation. Companies, already adept at low-cost entertainment optimized by algorithms, are adopting generative AI to produce content faster and at a lower cost. In January, 470 AI-generated short dramas were published daily, according to DataEye. Companies like Kunlun Tech are ramping up their use of AI, reducing filming crews and completely reorganizing their production processes.

Endless Stories, Recurring Tropes

Short dramas, known for their limited budgets, are now even cheaper to produce thanks to AI. Production timelines, which previously took several months, can now be reduced to less than a month. Tang Tang, vice president of FlexTV, claims that AI can cut production costs by 80% to 90%. Producing a short drama in North America once cost around $200,000.

Companies follow a proven model: buy traffic on platforms like TikTok, offer a few free episodes, and then charge viewers for the rest. Production decisions are guided by performance data rather than creative instinct. Projects are often categorized by specific keywords, such as "campus romance" or "reborn vengeance," a popular genre where a protagonist is reincarnated to change their fate.

The industry operates at a relentless pace. "Everyone expects quick returns," says Tang. "In China, if a series doesn't break even within a month, the industry considers it a failure."

Phoenix Zhu, a freelance screenwriter, explains that stories must maintain a high emotional intensity, often at the expense of narrative logic. "You have to keep the emotional intensity extremely high throughout the show, using the same narrative devices over and over: sudden deaths, betrayals, physical violence, huge confrontations," Zhu states.

AI at the Heart of Production

The compatibility of short dramas with AI has led companies like FlexTV to abandon traditional productions in favor of AI-generated ones. Kunlun Tech, the parent company of the drama apps DramaWave and FreeReels, began producing AI dramas in 2025 and now offers over 1,000 AI titles. StoReels aims to produce 100 AI dramas per month.

Han “Daniel” Fang, CEO of Kunlun Tech, emphasizes that the company continues to invest in traditional productions but sees AI as a cost-effective way to experiment with new genres. "We want to increase the share of AI work to 20% of the platform," says Fang.

The global microdrama market is expected to reach $11 billion by 2025 and $14 billion by the end of 2026, according to Omdia. The United States is projected to generate $1.5 billion in revenue from this market this year.

"No one expects high-level art when watching short dramas," says investor Shangguan Hong, former partner at Legend Capital. "The short drama industry already distinguishes itself from traditional television and cinema through its real-time and data-driven nature. AI only deepens this logic. In a sense, short drama is perfectly compatible with AI."

Inside the Content Machine

The AI revolution in the industry is already changing the types of roles needed to create short dramas. Phoenix Zhu graduated in 2024 with a degree in philosophy. After months of rejections from traditional media and film studios, she finally found work writing scripts for short dramas. "It was a very tough job market for young people," says Zhu. "I couldn't afford to be picky about what I wrote."

To make ends meet, Zhu juggled various odd jobs, including barista, flower seller, and event coordinator, while taking on freelance writing gigs online for advertising and education companies. In April 2025, she sold her first short drama script for about 20,000 yuan (approximately $2,945). More orders followed, and she thought her career was finally taking off.

Then AI arrived. Two projects already under contract were abruptly canceled, Zhu says. Rates in the industry began to plummet. The raises she hoped for as she gained more experience never materialized.

Yet, writers like Zhu have been among the least disrupted workers in the industry. Many production roles on traditional film sets have nearly disappeared from AI-generated productions.

"We could reduce the production team to about 10 people," says Tang, vice president of FlexTV. Like many companies in the industry, FlexTV primarily relies on Chinese writers and production teams, even for shows featuring non-Chinese characters aimed at foreign audiences. The reason is not just lower costs, says Tang, but also that Chinese writers better understand the pacing and narrative rhythm of short dramas.

Instead of camera crews, lighting technicians, makeup artists, and visual effects teams, AI productions now rely on smaller groups primarily composed of producers, writers, AI directors, and "AI asset curators."

An AI asset curator translates scripts into prompts and generates reference images of characters, costumes, and scenes for the AI video models to follow. MIT Technology Review found hundreds of job postings for this role on Chinese job sites, many requiring little prior experience in the industry, beyond familiarity with AI tools.

"The technology has improved tremendously just in the last few months," says Hanzhong Bai, an AI short drama producer based in Beijing. Bai says it is common for AI asset curators to use prompts like "combine the faces of these celebrities I love" when generating characters. Studios typically use a mix of tools, including Google's image generation model Nano Banana, Seedance from ByteDance, and Kling from Kuaishou. For producers like Bai, AI also makes it economically viable to produce genres that were previously too costly for short dramas, especially fantasy series requiring elaborate visual effects, costumes, or makeup. "We will see many more dragon and mermaid shows for this reason," says Bai.

The compressed production cycle has also changed the writing process itself. Writers once had two to three months to finish a script. Now, says Zhu, platforms often expect delivery within a month. Scripts can also be rougher and more flexible, as scenes, visuals, and even plot details can be modified later through prompts.

As a result, writers increasingly have to write for AI models as much as for human audiences. Zhu says she now has to describe scenes with much greater visual specificity, effectively taking on responsibilities once managed by cinematographers or visual effects teams.

"Before AI, writing 'He gave her a cold look' might have sufficed," says Zhu. "Now, I might have to write, 'Cold beams of light shot from his eyes.'"