一天四百七十部：AI正在重塑中国最大的内容赛道

Speaking of the fastest-growing cultural industry in China in recent years, microdramas is an unavoidable topic.

This industry went from zero to a hundred billion in only about three years.

And this year, the industry is going through an even more dramatic change.

The change is called AI.

According to the latest data, about 470 new microdramas launched daily in China in January 2026.

470, in one day.

If you wanted to watch them all one by one at 10 minutes each, you'd need to watch 78 hours straight in a single day.

The problem is there are only 24 hours in a day.

So the answer is simple — no one can finish, and no one needs to finish.

This number is actually just the surface of the supply side.

What's really interesting is who is filling this supply side.

Last year, among all microdramas in the top 100 hot list, AI-assisted or AI-native works made up about 7%.

This year, that number has soared to 38%.

In one year, it grew more than five times.

Total play count reached 2.5 billion views.

What does that mean?

It means on average every Chinese person has scrolled through an AI microdrama at least twice.

Many just didn't realize it themselves.

Let's clarify the terms first.

The industry now divides AI microdramas into two categories: AI-assisted production and AI-native generation.

The first category is the traditional filming process plus AI tools.

Real people are still real people, scenes are still real locations.

But scripts use AI-assisted creation, post-production uses AI for effects and color grading, translation and dubbing uses AI to localize to different language markets.

This category is currently the mainstream.

Its value isn't in disruption, but in dramatically lowering costs and speeding things up.

The second category is much more radical.

AI-native means not even actors are needed — everything is created by generative models: characters, scenes, movements, and dialogue.

The "person" you see doesn't actually exist, the "scene" you see was never captured by any camera.

This category is still in rapid experimentation.

The technology is unstable, and audience acceptance is uneven.

But the growth rate is astonishing.

There's a concrete example that shows how fast AI-native can run.

This March, an AI short drama called "The Fox Spirit's Revenge" went viral on Douyin.

All of the drama's characters, visuals, and movements were AI-generated.

The production team had only three people, and the entire drama's production cycle was less than two weeks.

The cost was less than one-fifth of a traditional short drama of the same genre.

But the play count exceeded 100 million.

After this drama, many small studios started imitating this model.

The whole industry suddenly realized: so this is how you can play this.

The core value AI brings to this industry actually isn't per-drama cost reduction.

It's the collapse of trial-and-error costs.

Before, making a short drama, even the cheapest version, required investing several hundred thousand to a million.

After making it, you'd bet on it.

Audience likes it, you make your money back; audience doesn't, it goes down the drain.

This model made investors very cautious.

Everyone wanted to make already-validated genres.

Repeatedly producing homogenized content.

Now with AI, the cost can drop to one-tenth or even one-twentieth of the original.

This means producers can make many more bold attempts.

Can develop ten genres at once.

Chase whichever one catches on.

Withdraw whichever doesn't.

This is what Silicon Valley calls "rapid iteration."

But now, for the first time, it's become reality in China's content industry.

Of course, cheap and fast aren't without a price.

The first price is copyright.

Some producers use AI to generate famous actors' faces and voices.

Making short dramas that appear to star those actors.

But those actors have no idea.

These "AI face-swap" infringement incidents have happened several times this year.

Triggering strong backlash from celebrities and the legal community.

The second price is regulation.

The Chinese government's control over the content industry has always been strict.

Microdramas used to be a relatively gray area.

Because the volume is too large, regulators simply couldn't keep up with reviews.

The government's response now is to raise the entry threshold.

Starting January 1, 2026, the minimum investment threshold for key microdramas was raised from 1 million yuan to 3 million yuan.

At the same time, new dramas must first be reported to the radio and TV bureau before going online.

Only after passing review can they be published.

The logic of this policy is clear.

It's to "de-retail" the industry.

Squeezing out those small workshops without qualifications or compliance capabilities.

Only leaving big companies with scale and compliance teams.

From a national governance perspective this is reasonable.

But it also means some creators will be eliminated.

The third price is labor.

This is the heaviest price.

The microdrama industry also provided a lot of employment this year.

Actors, directors, cinematographers, script supervisors, lighting, editing.

Many people who were struggling on the margins of the traditional film and TV industry found new livelihoods in the microdrama industry.

But AI's rapid adoption is directly threatening these jobs.

One AI post-production can do the work of five to ten editors.

One AI voice actor can replace an entire voice-over team.

One AI art can replace set crew and scenic.

These replacements aren't the future.

They're the reality happening now.

The industry has already started seeing large numbers of laid-off workers.

Many are middle-aged people in their thirties and forties with elderly parents and young children.

This problem has no simple answer.

Technological progress never stops just because it will disrupt jobs.

But the people being disrupted are real people too.

The fourth issue is more profound.

It's the boundary of authenticity.

When you watch a person cry, laugh, or speak on your phone.

You assume by default that it's a real person.

AI-native microdramas are breaking this default.

What you see may not be a person at all.

Just a trained pile of pixels.

In the short term this is just a technological novelty.

In the long term it's a fundamental restructuring of how humans consume content.

For tens of thousands of years, we've been consuming "stories from real people."

In the future we may start consuming "machine-generated stories."

This isn't a question of good or bad.

It's a fact that's happening.

We need time to understand its impact.

China's microdrama industry is just the frontier of this wave of AI content revolution.

Because its iteration speed is the fastest, the threshold is the lowest, and the scale is the largest.

But following behind is the entire entertainment industry.

Movies, TV shows, animation, games.

All these industries are facing the same question.

Will AI replace human creators?

If yes, how much?

If no, where is the place for human creators?

Nobody has answers to these questions.

But China's short drama industry is giving the whole world a living sample.

A sample that can be observed, studied, and learned from.

In the coming years, we'll all be watching this sample.

Watching what it becomes.

Watching where it takes us.