How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines

In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest.

“Two months,” the man says. “Give me an heir, or I will eat you.”

The scene is from Carrying the Dragon King’s Baby, one of the many hundreds of short dramas that appear on apps like DramaWave and ReelShort. There’s just something about this one that isn’t quite right. The lighting may be glossy and cinematic, but the show has an odd visual texture like something between a movie and a video game cutscene. 

That’s because Carrying the Dragon King’s Baby is part of a new trend for making these shows entirely with AI: no actors, camera operators, cinematographers, or CGI specialists required.

China’s short drama industry has boomed since its launch, in 2018. These ultrashort, melodramatic, and often smutty shows are designed for smartphone viewing, with episodes often running just one or two minutes long: Viewers can finish an entire series in as little as 30 minutes to an hour. The films are made for endless scrolling, packed with emotional confrontations and melodramatic plot twists. The trend’s growth is driven by apps that bombard TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook with cliffhanger-heavy ads designed to lure viewers into buying subscriptions. In 2024, China’s short drama market reached roughly $6.9 billion in revenue, surpassing the country’s annual box office earnings for the first time. 

Since 2022, Chinese short drama companies have aggressively expanded overseas, translating existing hits and producing localized series featuring local actors. Globally, short drama apps have approached a billion cumulative downloads. The United States is the biggest market outside of China, providing around 50% of the revenue, according to research firm DataEye.

Now the industry is reinventing itself. Chinese short drama companies—already masters of low-budget, algorithmically optimized entertainment—are embracing generative AI to produce content faster and cheaper than ever. An average of 470 AI-generated short dramas were released every day in January, according to DataEye. Short-drama companies like Kunlun Tech are ramping up AI productions, shrinking film crews, and reorganizing the labor pipeline from the ground up. For some studios, AI has moved from being a supporting tool to providing the backbone of production itself.

Infinite stories, infinite tropes

Short dramas are already famously low-budget. But AI has made them dramatically cheaper to mass-produce, helping to accelerate the entire process—and save money. Production timelines have collapsed. Conceptualization, script writing, casting, shooting, and editing used to take three to four months. With AI, the process can now take less than a month, says Tang Tang, vice president at short-drama platform FlexTV. Producing a short drama in North America once cost roughly $200,000, but AI can cut that cost by 80% to 90%, according to Tang.

After expanding into the US market, Chinese short drama companies largely followed the same playbook they used in China: Buy traffic aggressively on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube; offer a handful of free episodes; then charge viewers to unlock the rest inside the companies’ apps. Decisions about what to produce next are often driven less by creative instinct than by performance data. “We look at what themes, plotlines, and writers resonate with audiences, then quickly adjust,” says Tang.

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

As a result, screenwriters who spoke with MIT Technology Review said platforms often categorize projects using highly specific keywords that encompass everything from genre and setting to plot structure, such as “campus romance,” “gang rivalry,” “enemies to lovers,” or “rags to riches.” Recently, one of the most popular genres has been “reborn revenge,” a fantasy trope in which a wronged protagonist is miraculously reborn and given a chance to change their fate.

“You kind of have to keep the emotional intensity extremely high throughout the show, using the same plot devices over and over again: sudden deaths, betrayals, physical violence, huge confrontations,” says Phoenix Zhu, a freelance short drama screenwriter based in Suzhou. “It’s common to sacrifice narrative logic for shock value, because otherwise people are more likely to scroll away.”

Those simple tropes have made the format particularly compatible with AI-generated production. Earlier this year, FlexTV halted all traditionally shot productions and shifted entirely to AI-generated dramas. Kunlun Tech, the parent company of drama apps DramaWave and FreeReels, began producing AI-generated short dramas in 2025 and now offers more than 1,000 AI titles on its platforms. StoReels, another popular short drama company targeting a global audience, has said it aims to produce 100 AI-generated dramas per month.

“People’s attention spans are getting shorter, and serialized drama naturally has to get shorter,” says Han “Daniel” Fang, the CEO of Kunlun Tech. Fang told MIT Technology Review that the company is not going to stop investing in traditionally shot short dramas with real actors. But the company is expanding AI-generated productions and gradually increasing their share on its platforms as a low-cost way to experiment with new genres, themes, and ideas. “We want to bring the amount of AI work to 20% of the platform,” Fang says.

The format is also rapidly growing overseas. Research firm Omdia estimates that the global microdrama market reached $11 billion in 2025 and will grow to $14 billion by the end of 2026. The United States is expected to generate $1.5 billion in revenue in that market this year.

“No one comes to short dramas expecting high art,” says investor Shangguan Hong, former partner of Legend Capital. “The short-drama industry already stands out from traditional TV and filmmaking by being real-time and data-driven. AI only furthers that logic. In a sense, short drama is perfectly compatible with AI.”

Inside the content machine

The industry’s AI revolution is already changing the type of roles required to make short dramas. 

Phoenix Zhu graduated from college in 2024 with a degree in philosophy. After months of rejections from traditional media and film studios, she eventually found work writing scripts for short dramas. “It was a very difficult job market for young people,” Zhu says. “I couldn’t afford to be picky about what I wrote.”

To support herself, Zhu worked a string of part-time jobs, including as a barista, a flower seller, and an event coordinator, while taking freelance writing gigs online for advertising and education companies. In April 2025, she sold her first short-drama script for around 20,000 yuan (approximately $2,945). More commissions followed, and she thought her career was finally beginning to pick up.

Then AI arrived. Two projects already in the contract stage were abruptly canceled, Zhu says. Rates across the industry began falling. The raises she expected as she gained more experience never materialized. 

Still, writers like Zhu have been among the less disrupted workers in the industry. Many production roles on traditional filming sets have disappeared almost entirely from AI-generated productions.

“We could shrink the production team down to around 10 people,” says Tang, vice president at FlexTV. Like many companies in the industry, FlexTV relies primarily on Chinese writers and production teams, even for shows featuring non-Chinese characters and targeting overseas audiences. The reason is not just lower costs, Tang says, 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 consisting largely 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 AI video models to follow. MIT Technology Review found hundreds of job listings for the role on Chinese job sites, many requiring little prior industry experience beyond familiarity with AI tools.

“The technology has improved enormously just in the past 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 like” when generating characters. Studios typically use a mix of tools, including Google’s image-generation model Nano Banana, ByteDance’s Seedance, and Kuaishou’s Kling.

For producers like Bai, AI also makes it economically viable to produce genres that were previously too expensive for short dramas, especially fantasy series requiring elaborate visual effects, costumes, or makeup. “We’ll see many more dragon and mermaid shows for exactly this reason,” Bai says.

The compressed production cycle has also changed the writing process itself. Writers once had two to three months to finish a script. Now, Zhu says, platforms often expect delivery within a month. Scripts can also be rougher and more flexible, since scenes, visuals, and even plot details can be changed 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 far greater visual specificity, effectively taking on responsibilities once handled by cinematographers or visual effects teams.

“Before AI, writing ‘He gave her a cold stare’ might have been enough,” Zhu says. “Now I might need to write, ‘Cold beams of light shot out from his eyes.’”

Fang of Kunlun Tech believes the future quality of AI-generated short dramas is ultimately a numbers game. “Good ideas and good writing still stand out,” Fang says. “The quality [of AI short drama] will improve simply because more people with strong ideas will be able to make their shows.”