Hello! I'm your financial journalist and friend, an economist. Today, we're going to talk about an industry seismic shift that's happening and could be more intense than you might imagine: AI is reshaping—and even "devouring"—the short-form video and drama market with unstoppable force.
The core argument of this article is quite stark: The explosion of AI-generated short-form content isn't a warning of "the wolf coming"; it's a reality where the "wolf" is already lurking at your doorstep. While AI has made creating content extremely cheap, it has also led to an overabundance of low-quality material, pushing the entire industry into a paradox of seemingly booming growth but actually intense competition and thin profits.
To help you fully understand this, I've broken down the news into five key points, explained in plain language.
1. Phenomenal Explosion: How AI Short-Form Content Is Crushing Real-Actor Short-Form Content
First, let's look at an astonishing statistic: In the first eight months of this year, 430,000 short-form videos were released, 13 times the total for the entire last year. Even more alarming, over 90% of them were generated by AI.
It's like going from a traditional film-making process (like a workshop) to an automated one (like an vending machine). Why has AI won so quickly? Because the technical barriers have been completely broken down:
- Previously (early 2024): To create a few seconds of AI-generated animation, you had to take a class and spend hours, with mediocre results.
- Now (early 2026): With tools like Seedance 2.0 and Cleric 3.0, you just need to type a few keywords, and in 30 seconds, you can get a 30-second video with significantly improved quality.
This means that as long as you know how to write the right prompts, a few people can produce a video without actors, a studio, or a post-production team. This extreme low cost and speed have overwhelmed the market with AI-generated content. Even the National Radio and Television Administration has become concerned, calling for "strong support for real-actor short-form content," which indirectly acknowledges that real-actor content can't compete with AI on its own and needs policy intervention to survive.
2. The Paradox of Commercial Logic: Why Is Being Cheaper Not Equal to Making Money?
Many people think that since AI makes content cheap, it must be highly profitable, right?
That's completely wrong. This is a classic example of a "scale trap":
- Costs have indeed dropped: Long-form dramas cost tens of millions, while real-actor short-form dramas cost 300,000 to 500,000 yuan, but AI-generated ones only cost 30,000 to 50,000 yuan. The production cycle has also been reduced from one to two months to one to two weeks.
- But profits have plummeted: In the first half of this year, TikTok released 220,000 AI-generated short-form videos. To break even, a video needed 50 million views, and only 1.3% of them managed to do so. Only 1,055 videos, or 0.48%, achieved over 100 million views.
- Price per view has plummeted: AI-generated videos used to earn 30 to 100 yuan per 10,000 views; now it's down to 5 to 10 yuan. A video that achieves over 100 million views might only earn 50,000 to 100,000 yuan.
Do the math: With a cost of 30,000 to 50,000 yuan, plus team salaries, advertising, and operational expenses, you might end up with a profit of only 50,000 to 100,000 yuan—or even in the red.
This has changed the industry's logic: Since most videos don't make money, the focus is on quantity rather than quality. It's like going from producing a few dozen short-form videos in hopes of one becoming a hit to producing thousands in hopes of one hit. Only by producing a massive amount of content can you hope to offset the costs with a few big hits.
3. Deteriorating Content Ecology: From "Low Quality" to "Cognitive Degeneration"
Short-form content is already considered for a lower-tier audience, with themes like comebacks, revenge, and emotional dramas. But AI-generated content has taken this trend to extremes, turning it into a form of "digital junk food":
- Severe homogenization: Real-actor short-form dramas may have similar tropes, but at least the actors' expressions and movements are slightly different. AI-generated videos use the same faces, expressions, and dialogue. The themes are always the same old ones, like infidelity or petty schemes.
- The "echo chamber" effect of algorithms: If you like these boring AI-generated videos, the platform will keep showing you more of them. This is what a Tencent vice president described as: "If you like ‘pig food,’ all you see will be ‘pig food.’"
- Aesthetic degradation and cognitive decline: The Oxford Dictionary chose "Brain rot" as the word of the year to describe the decline in intelligence caused by long-term consumption of low-quality information. AI-generated content accelerates this process. It offers no new information and is full of clichés, but its well-designed moments (like pausing halfway through a slap) trigger dopamine responses, making it hard to stop watching, even though it's stupid.
4. Industry Secrets: The Risk of Piracy and the Brief Window for Going Global
In this fiercely competitive market, there are many gray areas:
- Piracy is common: Since the chances of a video becoming a hit are so low, the chances of it being noticed or complained about are also low. Many teams use unauthorized images and music, which is almost a given with AI-generated content.
- The last refuge: Going global: With such intense competition in China, the only "blue ocean" is going overseas to markets like Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. However, Chinese teams are quickly taking over these markets, meaning this window of opportunity might be closing in just a few months.
5. The Ultimate Question: Do We Still Need High-Quality Content?
Finally, let's consider the broader implications for us as individuals.
The rise of AI-generated content is essentially a challenge to our aesthetic patience and the value we place on quality:
- In the era of long-form dramas: A few hundred dramas are released each year, and a few dozen stay in people's memories.
- In the era of real-actor short-form dramas: Ten thousand dramas are released each year, and one in a hundred is somewhat interesting.
- In the era of AI-generated content: Hundreds of thousands of videos are released each year, but only a few dozen are remembered.
When there's so much content that you can never finish watching, and when "digital junk food" dilutes the market, viewers become too lazy to seek out the rare gems. We face a choice: Do we continue to be fed by algorithms with 15-second, meaningless AI snippets, or do we take the time to enjoy a long-form drama or movie that requires patience, aesthetic appreciation, and depth?
AI-generated content can't be stopped; it's a technological force. But as consumers, we can choose to be selective. As AI-generated content continues to compete fiercely, let's take a break and support the works that truly require time and care. After all, our attention is the most valuable resource of this era.