AI-native young people no longer need real people to ship their favorite couples.

In the era of AI short dramas, the continuously declining technical costs enable producers to fully capture all revenues from content production and AI talent agency, so as to maximize their benefits.

Nowadays, the themes of AI short dramas have been greatly enriched. Genres that real-person drama producers dare not invest in casually, such as post-apocalyptic, zombie, sci-fi, fantasy, and xianxia, are now in ample supply.

However, the traditional ever-popular genres that attract the most attention and revenue, and can unite the vast majority of drama viewers, are still the classic hits: ancient costume romance and modern romance.

Moreover, while watching these works, you will constantly suspect that you are watching the idol dramas from the early 2000s, which may represent the real preference of the mainstream market.

In any case, shipping CP, as an entertainment activity with inherent emotional driving force, has once again proved its leveraging power in AI short dramas where productivity and creativity are gradually improving.

01

When AI CP "Gains Flesh and Blood"

"Give You Deep Affection for the Rest of Life" is one of the most viral AI short dramas this summer. It has been broadcast for five seasons, with a total of nearly 5 billion views across all platforms.

Its plot has some new twists in the conventional framework. The female lead Rong Jiqiao saved the young master of a wealthy family Duan Yan, who was in distress and lost his memory in her previous life. But Rong Jiqiao is not the kind of innocent and kind female lead that was popular in the past; on the contrary, she is vain.

She thought the male lead had a good appearance and decent dressing, so he should come from a well-off family, but it turned out that he remembered nothing about his past. After they moved to the big city, he could only do manual labor on construction sites every day to support the family. The female lead spent the male lead's hard-earned money without any qualms, and finally ended up being killed.

After being reborn, she decided to reverse the fate of being killed and look for opportunities to escape.

What is particularly innovative is that the production team and the audience enthusiastically built up the CP of the AI virtual characters together.

Buwen Culture, the producer, opened a CP account and personal character accounts for the series "Give You Deep Affection", releasing behind-the-scenes footage of AI actors, popular gesture dances on Douyin, sweet interactions, and even donated money to the disaster-stricken areas in Guangxi in the name of the characters in the drama.

In short, they can do everything real celebrities do in their daily promotion, and even more, making it convenient for fans to participate in the daily life of this CP from different perspectives.

Moreover, in the early stage, when Buwen Culture found that the collection volume of the drama was very high but the clip traffic on Douyin was not satisfactory, they actively encouraged fans to create derivative works, which successfully expanded the influence of the story. As a result, fans created a lot of interesting derivative content for Duan Yan and Rong Jiqiao, including shooting on-set footage, opening worship ceremonies and so on.

The latest development is that the two characters have "cooperated for the second time" and "third time" in new dramas, "The Chaos of Male and Female Frequency After Breakup" and "The Winter Solstice of That Year for You".

Another drama "Green Plum by the Inkstone" created entirely by the author Wanwan is also very popular, and has been broadcast on Anhui TV.

The drama is inspired by the story behind Yan Zhenqing's "Eulogy to My Nephew". The protagonists are Yan Jiming, the nephew of Yan Zhenqing, and the time-traveling female lead Li Youwei, depicting their story of defending their homeland. Its conception, modeling, texture are different from the assembly-line short dramas commonly seen on the market. The emotional line is very appealing, and the fate line is solemn and stirring. It is not a pure wish-fulfillment story, after all, the male lead is doomed to die in history.

After the male lead's death, he also travels to modern times. In addition to the sweet daily life of the young couple, they also return to Zhengding City in Shijiazhuang, where the male lead once guarded, making history and reality converge, and making the audience more emotionally invested.

The male and female leads also accepted an interview from the entertainment channel of Sina Entertainment together, successfully breaking the fourth wall for this AI couple.

The logic behind this is unified. When a single hit drama cannot bring huge broadcast revenue, the production company will definitely seek a more stable and long-term business model.

The serialization of dramas is also a major trend of short dramas recently. Instead of testing algorithms with content, companies that can produce high-quality content tend to continue to increase investment after confirming that a story is popular. In this case, they will continue to work on the existing series to tap out more "residual value".

Capitalizing AI characters as assets and letting the audience consolidate emotional connections through shipping CP can enable production companies to carry out talent operation on this basis, accumulate fans, and change the situation where character assets are "forgotten as soon as the drama ends" in the past.

The audience is no stranger to this routine. After all, all the top male and female stars that emerged from ancient costume romance dramas basically replicated a similar model.

Buwen Culture is one of the companies that moves very fast in this field. They created 3 character accounts and 1 CP account for the male and female leads (@Duan Yan and Rong Jiqiao, with 530,000 followers) for the "Give You Deep Affection" series. At the same time, they took advantage of the popularity of the series to let the male and female leads of several series under the company appear in the same frame for bundled promotion. For example, several male leads danced the "cute boy waist-twisting dance" for the female leads together.

02

Shipping All Kinds of CP Only Makes Me More "Nutritious"

Shipping CP is a continuous source of dopamine. Many fans are not only shipping the CP itself, but also the joy and sense of participation when digging for sweet details. Super topics, communities, and even a simple sentence of "wish you two be together forever" can create a unique social relationship. This emotional concentration and willingness to spend money make CP fans the engine of cash flow. CP marketing has long been a tried-and-true traffic password in the film and television industry.

And attention means everything. Nowadays, many people's content consumption has shifted to AI short dramas.

Shipping CP in AI dramas has a different experience, but also brings extremely high emotional value.

In terms of texture, the appearance and styling of the characters in top-tier AI dramas easily outperform real actors, and the production is also striving to get close to the level of real-person dramas. The character modeling of the male and female leads in "Give You Deep Affection" has received wide acclaim. And since they are AI characters, the cost of styling is low, and the protagonists change clothes very frequently, bringing a great viewing experience.

This drama also has delicate depictions in micro-expressions and the rhythm of rival scenes. A relevant person in charge of Buwen Culture once told Blue Whale News that a high-quality project will devote a lot of energy to polishing "quality, lens complexity and character performance".

"The Laid-off Girl" stands out by virtue of its sense of realism. The female lead Fang Taozi retains slightly flawed skin texture, and many people exclaimed: "Is this not played by a real person?"

In the past, many celebrities were often complained about their "AI-style rigid acting". Now the acting skills of AI actors have surpassed many celebrities. The audience can tell which one is the low-end version and which one is the high-end version between long dramas and AI short dramas.

The classic settings of web novels and short dramas that CP fans are very familiar with, such as identity reversal, rebirth and counterattack, marriage before love, the "chase your wife to the crematorium" plot, as well as the time-tested CP character settings of "domineering president X confused girl" and "cold male god X energetic girl", have all been applied to AI dramas.

The plot of "Give You Deep Affection" that many people complain about being abusive to the female lead and overly dramatic has hit the aesthetic common divisor of the public, especially the short drama audience. The previous life of the female lead Rong Jiqiao is very miserable, and she died at a young age, which is exactly the "deceased wife literature" loved by the public who prefer down-to-earth dramatic stories.

The audiences who support the male lead Duan Yan and those who support the female lead Rong Jiqiao have argued from Hongguo and Douyin to Xiaohongshu, and their love and hatred are naturally placed on the AI CP.

In "Green Plum by the Inkstone", the time-traveling Li Youwei and Yan Jiming, who is destined to die for his country, have delicate emotional tension, as well as the heaviness of fate and family and country, which perfectly fits the "BE aesthetics" that CP fans love.

This kind of unfinished regret is most likely to stimulate fans' desire for discussion and the trend of creating derivative works.

It should be noted that in the CP fandom, creating fan works is often the core of maintaining the popularity of a CP and the activity of the community. Nowadays, AI tools have greatly lowered the threshold for ordinary users to become video editors for derivative works. As a result, some high-quality works have amazing long-tail effects on social media.

In terms of CP marketing, AI dramas now show a trend of being even better than their predecessors.

The "on-set leaked footage culture" in Chinese entertainment has spread to the AI drama circle. A 10-second blurry leaked footage of AI actors received 130,000 likes within 5 days. From the leaked footage from the perspective of fan photographers, behind-the-scenes clips to the daily vlogs of the leading actors, these promotional materials that look exactly like those of real-person dramas are all generated by AI.

Now there are also AI romance variety shows, or AI pseudo-documentary romance processes, and even CP exclusive interviews, which fully meet all kinds of demands of shipping CP with abundant supply.

For CP fans, AI CP has another core selling point, that is, they can ship with more peace of mind — the CP will not suddenly have a scandal that ruins their image, or suddenly be exposed to have a spouse or children.

After real actors become popular because of CP, they often have to face the problem of breaking up the CP, and the conflict of interests in it is difficult to coordinate.

However, the CP in AI dramas is completely controlled by the production company. Multiple collaborations are not a dream. As long as the boss gives an order, the actors always have time. In addition to Duan Yan and Rong Jiqiao, the protagonists Tang Shi and Song Ci in "Vermilion Kiss" have also cooperated for the second time.

However, many audiences hope to maintain the boundary between the two-dimensional world and the real world, and think that characters should not exist outside the story. Just imagine, if the production company tells you that the well-known CP "Wang Xian" is played by two actors and all the emotions are performed, how could the CP fans not be furious? There are many negative comments in the comment area of the fan-made leaked video of Duan Yan and Rong Jiqiao.

In real-person dramas, fans ship CP with real feelings, believing that "the CP I ship is real". The attractive details of real-person CP, whether it is the "wonderful ambiguous period" or the "hidden love among the full guests", can often continuously stimulate discussions and increase the emotional stickiness of fans.

But AI CP has no physical entity, and the emotional interaction between them is a kind of "industrial sugar" that all parties know well. The operation logic of AI CP cannot be copied from real people. In fact, it is more like the visualization of novels and two-dimensional paper figures. Maintaining the credibility of the worldview and characters is the basis for people to fall in love with the CP.

In any case, fans have a new way to ship CP, and new AI CP have become popular in the Chinese entertainment industry. As the hot search topic "Two AI actors are more popular than the upcoming real celebrities" topped the Weibo hot search list, AI CP has begun to accurately capture the target audience.

03

AI CP With "Original Sin"

The core of short dramas has always been the competition of CP.

In the heyday of real-person short dramas, popular CP would cooperate for the second, third, or even more than ten times. The most legendary one is probably the "Zhu Bai CP" formed by Zhu Yiwei and Bai Xinyi, who set a record of 38 cooperations and have become real married couples.

But short drama actors are not assets of the company after all.

In the era of AI short dramas, the continuously declining technical costs enable producers to fully capture all revenues from content production and AI talent agency, so as to maximize their benefits. This is exactly the reason why companies like Buwen Culture vigorously operate AI character accounts.

The commercialization exploration of AI CP is almost running all the way along with the industry trend.

For example, "Duan Yan" was officially named as the Qixi Festival "AI Best Friend" by Tmall, and starred in brand advertisements. Virtual AI characters have begun to get the commercial treatment that only real idols have. Of course, from the advertising treatment, we can also see that "Give You Deep Affection" is another old formula of "romance drama that makes the male lead popular".

"The Laid-off Girl" also carries out daily personal content operation with the