Hollywood fears an AI future. China is already living it

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Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio.

Chen’s role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen’s face to generate an avatar, also known as a “digital human,” to star in an AI-generated movie.

“If you can’t beat it, join it,” said Chen, 38, who works in Beijing.

The Chinese film and video industry is being transformed by AI-driven storytelling, fueled by rapid advances in video generation software, and at ground zero are the so-called micro dramas that play out on millions of smartphones.

Typically just a minute or two in length, the videos are devoured by Chinese audiences at breakfast, on their morning commutes, during their lunch breaks and on their free time after work — and almost any time in between.

More of a snack than a meal, micro dramas are fleeting and don’t demand the same top-notch acting and high quality resolution as movies, making them an ideal vehicle for AI-generated content. And the cost of producing them has been cut drastically through the use of AI software developed by Chinese technology juggernauts including Kuaishou Technology and TikTok’s global owner, ByteDance.

The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI, the association said.

Similar tools are being tested in the U.S., and the AI trends upending China’s entertainment industry may be a harbinger for what’s to come in Hollywood, said Michael Berry, a professor specializing in contemporary Chinese culture at UCLA.

Already, Chinese companies that sell AI-powered video-generation software are seeking inroads in Hollywood. Earlier this year, ByteDance (now a minority owner in its U.S. TikTok unit) showcased its Seedance video platform at a splashy event in Santa Monica. Other Chinese companies with global ambitions include Alibaba’s HappyHorse and Kuaishou subsidiary Kling.

AI allows anyone with a laptop to produce entertainment, which means Americans could soon find themselves consuming content created by Chinese producers, Berry said.

“It doesn’t matter where you are, where the funding is coming from, or the ethnicity of the ‘actors,’ who are all bots anyway,” Berry said. “In this new environment, none of the old rules matter anymore.”

AI in “China’s Hollywood”

Hengdian World Studios in China’s Zhejiang province has long been known as “China’s Hollywood.” But these days, its lavish sets and backdrops are attracting more tourists and fewer actors.

About 10,000 extras show up each day looking for work, but only about 800 of them will get hired, according to reports in state media. The number of short-drama productions hosted there had fallen by at least half from a year earlier, the Shanghai-based Jiefang Daily reported this spring.

Chen, who was talent-scouted as a teen, estimates that many actors might have lost more than 60% of their work this year. Some of that, he noted, was because viewers have moved to consume shorter videos instead.

“The pace of life has become faster and a lot of people don’t have the time to watch movies or television dramas anymore,” he said.

A legal deluge

Not everyone is losing work because of AI. Fan Baile, an entertainment lawyer in Beijing, says he is keeping busy as his celebrity clients take legal action against filmmakers for “stealing” their faces to create digital avatars.

The technology is racing ahead of regulation, Fan said, making Chinese judges ill-equipped to deal with the deluge of cases involving individual face protections and digital infringement.

“Traditional portrait infringement cases were straightforward: Using an unauthorized face constitutes an infringement,” Fan said. “Now, AI can preserve 70% to 80% of a person’s likeness while altering minor features, and it’s more complicated to assess infringements.”

In April, popular Chinese actor Jackson Yee made headlines when his studio issued a public statement that his face was being misused by AI drama producers.

Barely a week later, buzzy Chinese actor Dilraba Dilmura revealed she had sued and won a court case against the producer and distributor of an AI micro drama that featured an actor with a striking resemblance to her.

Even nonactors are dragged in. One commercial model discovered that photos she had posted on social media appeared to have been used to create a villain in the popular AI micro drama “The Peach Blossom Hairpin.”

In April, the Actors Committee of the China Federation of Radio and Television Associations released a statement condemning such infringements and asserted that AI platforms needed to comply with the laws and strengthen their compliance rules. Actors in Hollywood have raised similar concerns about unauthorized use of their likenesses by AI models.

But policing facial infringement is like playing whack-a-mole, Fan said. He said he once watched more than 50 AI micro drama series for clients, searching frame by frame for a fleeting three-second appearance of their faces. Some film producers, he says, deliberately make AI characters resemble stars, using notoriety resulting from the anger of fans to generate viewership for their work.

Producing an AI video

Sun Wei founded Feixiang Universe, the Shenzhen-based studio that cast Chen. The fear of accidentally “stealing someone’s face” was a big reason she said she decided to license real people’s likenesses for an AI production set during China’s Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago.

Thanks to AI’s training data bias, AI-generated performers tend to have similar features and share a homogenous look, Sun said. Many have flawless skin and extremely symmetrical faces, requiring her and other Chinese AI filmmakers to cast a wide net to “buy” new faces and digitize actor’s expressions.

The fast-talking Sun, who previously worked at Chinese video streaming platforms iQIYI, Youku and ByteDance’s Douyin, launched Feixiang Universe last year to produce AI films. She has a team of about 30 — young creators fluent in AI tools and prompting, a screenwriter, a director, as well as advertising, film-editing and postproduction professionals.

An idea for a film often begins as a short paragraph. The team then works with ChatGPT, Kimi or DeepSeek to flesh out the screenplay. The film’s screenwriter then takes over to revise and polish.

To produce the finished product, Sun’s team uses Chinese video-generation models to input the type of scenes, backgrounds and performers they want, with the AI generating 15 seconds of footage each time. The same software would be used to map Chen’s face and expressions onto his digital avatar.

Growing up, Sun said her dream was to produce films. AI helped turn that ambition into reality by upending the economics. In traditional filmmaking, movies featuring underwater environments, outer space, monsters and war all required steep budgets.

Now the cost was no longer dependent on the genre, but on the model used for video generation, image quality and token counts. She said a filmmaker no longer had to begin by asking, “Can we afford to shoot this?”

With AI, her team could pull together a 90-minute AI film suitable for release on Chinese streaming platforms for $500,000. Previously, filmmakers wouldn’t dare to start shooting a 40-episode television series without around $30 million in financing, she said.

“You can just let your imagination go,” Sun said.

Not ready for prime time

The video-generation technology rarely gets the content right on its first try, Sun said, adding that her team takes at least 10 attempts to create a satisfactory 15-second clip. Sometimes the faces were different, or the background inconsistent.

The models also had habits of their own. During concept design, the team deliberately tried to prevent the images generated from resembling existing movies and television dramas.

Even so, once Sun’s team fed their images into the AI video model, their Tang Dynasty city backdrop began to adopt some visual elements from iconic shows such as “The Longest Day in Chang’an,” a critically acclaimed period drama released in 2019. A character designed without reference to any celebrity might, once animated, begin to pick up the nose, mouth or gaze of a real actor.

Lu Beike, a director responsible for big-budget Chinese television serials such as “Three-Body” and “Taiping Nian,” said fully AI-generated movies or dramas were still far from ready for prime time.

AI can create scenes of vast ancient cities and majestic naval battles.

Yet, the technology still struggles with creating videos with a clear sense of depth and complex lighting, Lu said.

Lu has tried to use AI to produce scenes, such as light rays bouncing off water onto a rock or sunlight through double-pane Gothic windows: The AI failed miserably.

“My question is not whether AI can produce an impressive-looking shot, it’s whether that shot will meet the standards of a top-tier production,” said the director.

The humans looked too human

Then came another problem: The humans looked too human. Lu added that if 90% of a film was generated by AI, a real human performance could appear jarring.

A real actor’s expressions carried more nuance and emotion. The skin textures did not match. Sometimes the only solution was to process the live-action material until the person looked a little less real — until they fit back into the “AI world,” Lu said.

AI performers also struggled with conveying complicated emotions.

“Copying a face is not the same as copying an actor,” he said.

Chen Qiufan, one of China’s best-known science-fiction writers, was an early pioneer of AI-assisted storytelling.

Chen was one of the principal creators of the AI-generated micro drama “Divine Pen,” a series that drew about 100 million views within two weeks of its release. He previously used AI to write the novel and script for “Divine Pen.” Now, he’s forcing himself to write daily with pen and paper.

Chen said he has noticed a growing pushback against AI content, and an increasing number of independent creators are deliberately branding their films as “100% Human-Produced.”

Live concerts and performances were enjoying a revival, he added, with tickets getting more expensive and harder to get. When faces on a screen can be generated limitlessly, audiences might be more willing to pay for a physical venue and a real person in front of them, Chen said.

“AI isn’t art,” he said. “It is just a product.”

Ling Wei and Liza Lin are freelance journalists based in Boston.