AI Content Observation Series: Will AI Replace Live-Action Short Dramas?
In the first 8 months of this year, 430,000 micro-dramas were launched across all online platforms in total, 13 times the full-year figure of 2025, and over 90% of these works are generated by AI.
Once the floodgate of production capacity is opened, it will form a torrential flow: the production cost of one drama can be reduced to only a few thousand yuan, and one person can finish producing a drama in just a few days. On the other side of the screen, the total consumption time of nearly 1.1 billion online audiovisual users has long approached the ceiling — every person still has only 24 hours a day.
Productivity is advancing at a breakneck pace, yet people's attention stays static. This raises a question: excessive issuance of currency will lead to currency devaluation, so after the explosive growth of content supply, what exactly gets diluted? When content production no longer has high thresholds, what will become the scarce industrial resources? Will a good story, a refined aesthetic, an accurate judgment, or even the tears a real person sheds in front of the camera become cheaper, or more valuable?
In this roundtable hosted by Tencent Research Institute themed Six Midsummer Talks, three guests started from the perspectives of policy research, content production and video platforms respectively, launched a collision of views around the controversial topic of "whether AI will replace real-person micro-dramas", and further explored deeper dimensions:
Will content face "inflation"? When supply surges while total attention remains unchanged, what defines the value of a work?
What becomes more valuable? When production tools are accessible to everyone, what will become the core resource of the industry?
Where does the value flow to? After tools are made equally accessible, where will the profits of the industrial chain go?
Will aesthetic standards decline? Will the lowering of production thresholds give birth to new aesthetics, or lead to the overall regression of public aesthetics?
And the issue we all concern about:
Will AI and real humans create together, or will the growth of one come at the expense of the other? Where should we draw the line for AI's role in content creation?
During the two-hour conversation, the veil covering these questions was lifted layer by layer, leading to a clearer picture of the answers.
Guests to the dialogue:
PENG Jin Director of the Audiovisual Content Research Institute, Development Research Center of the National Radio and Television Administration
QIU Yi Founder and Chairman of Moment Interactive, the producer of the AI micro-drama Master of Feng Shui
CAO Rui Head of Content R&D and AI Innovation, Tencent Online Video Revenue-Sharing Drama Studio Group
Host:
CHEN Meng Senior Research Fellow, Tencent Research Institute
The following is the full transcript of the dialogue:
The era of "content inflation": Is AI leading to the dilution of the value of content products?
CHEN Meng: At the beginning of today's discussion, I would like to share a set of data with you to feel the current development trend of AI content: in the first quarter of this year, more than 128,000 micro-dramas were launched across all online platforms, a figure nearly 4 times the total volume of the whole year of 2025. Among them, AI-generated micro-dramas account for more than 95%, and have become the absolute main force in terms of scale.
This has brought a very interesting phenomenon: in the field of cultural content, we have witnessed an unprecedented explosion of production capacity.
But at the same time, the total amount of users' attention resources is nearly constant, and the audiovisual consumption time has also been on the verge of saturation. For example, by the end of 2025, the scale of online audiovisual users in China has reached 1.099 billion, and the average daily usage time per capita is 201 minutes. This means that online audiovisual services have become as ubiquitous as air, penetrating every corner of social life, leaving very limited room for the growth of audiovisual consumption time.
For this trend, we have a metaphor that may not be completely accurate but very vivid, called "content inflation". Borrowing the concept of "inflation" in economics, we put forward such a hypothesis: with the explosion of AI production capacity, will the content supply exceed the actual user demand, leading to the devaluation of the value of content products?
At the beginning of the dialogue, I would like to invite the three experts to talk about how to view the possibility of this "content inflation"?
PENG Jin: "Inflation" is a concept in economics, and I am a layman in the economic field. From the perspective of an outsider, my understanding of economic inflation is that under the condition of currency circulation, the average value of currency depreciates due to the fact that money supply exceeds demand.
In the content field, with the rapid development of AI, a similar situation has also emerged: the rapid growth of content quantity has led to the dilution of the average attention of users.
Just like the data mentioned by Teacher Chen earlier, the total number of micro-dramas launched in China in 2025 is 33,000, but in the first quarter of this year, the launch volume has reached 128,000. However, the time each user can spend on content consumption every day is limited, which is 24 hours. To a certain extent, due to the popularization of AI, the current micro-drama industry has indeed ushered in a rapid growth in the number of contents, which has also led to a substantial decline in the average attention that works can obtain.
However, I think there is still a relatively obvious difference between the so-called "content inflation" and currency inflation. There is a concept of "market clearing" in economics: when supply and demand are unbalanced, the market will clear or remove those low-quality goods. But after AI produces a large amount of content, these contents will not disappear out of thin air on the Internet, and will not go through such a clearing process. This creates a clear difference between the two phenomena.
CHEN Meng: Teacher Peng has long been paying attention to the development trend of the film and television industry and participating in the formulation of film and television policies. I would also like to ask you another related question: in your opinion, from the perspective of the entire film and television industry, why does this trend of supply exceeding demand first appear in the micro-drama segment?
PENG Jin: I think this is a very interesting question. Based on my own observation, AI is like a pebble, and the entire film and television industry is like a lake. After you throw this pebble into the water, the micro-dramas are the first circle of ripples closest to the pebble; but after the pebble is thrown into the lake, the ripples will inevitably spread out circle by circle, then reach medium and long dramas, and further expand to theater films.
As for why micro-dramas are the closest to the pebble, I summarize the reasons into three aspects.
The first aspect is the rapid advancement of technology. AI has turned "being able to be filmed" into "being able to be commercially applied". Since the first half of this year, several large video models have developed rapidly, solving the previous bottlenecks and pain points in the field of video generation, such as character consistency and long video generation capability. In the past, people might only use AI to produce short clips for secondary creation, but now the content has matured enough to achieve commercial use.
The second aspect is that compared with medium and long dramas and theater films, audiences may have a more tolerant attitude and relatively lower expectations for micro-dramas. In people's stereotype, micro-dramas are inherently content with short cycles and relatively rough production, and even a few years ago they were at the end of the entire "content consumption snobbery". People are relatively tolerant of some possible drawbacks brought by AI, such as imperfect picture presentation and minor problems in character authenticity. This inclusive atmosphere will encourage people to carry out more attempts, and also allow AI to be applied more rapidly in the micro-drama field.
The third aspect, I think, is highly related to platform policies. In our usual surveys, we have heard some production entities say a sentence that I find very interesting: "Whether a content work can become a hit does not depend on whether it can be produced, but on whether the platform is willing to give it traffic."
This also shows that platforms play the role of rule-makers in the development process of micro-dramas. For example, from the end of last year to the present, for AI micro-drama content, several major audiovisual platforms have launched dedicated content pages or independent apps; there is also a tilt in revenue sharing. Last year, the revenue sharing for 2D and 3D comic dramas was relatively high, and in the first few months of this year, the revenue sharing for AI virtual real-person dramas was relatively high. This is like a "baton" guiding the choice of practitioners. They are more willing to invest in a certain direction because they know that this direction can easily get traffic and make more money.
Combining these aspects, technological breakthroughs, audience tolerance and the resource tilt of platforms have enabled AI technology to be more widely and rapidly applied in the micro-drama field.
CHEN Meng: What Teacher Peng just mentioned shows that whether from the production side or the consumption side, AI can meet the development needs of micro-dramas, which is probably the content format that best matches the current technical capabilities of AI. Coupled with the strong drive of platforms, micro-dramas have become the first content scenario where AI is implemented on a large scale.
As a front-line producer in the industry, Mr. Qiu may have more direct feelings about this. From the perspective of market feedback, why do you think AI content can meet the needs of users? And in the development process of the past year, has the trend of content inflation appeared in the industry, for example, is it getting more and more difficult for content products to get good market feedback?
QIU Yi: I think AI does meet a lot of user needs, some of which were difficult to meet in the past. What AI brings to the micro-drama industry is not just a simple reduction in production costs, more importantly, it allows more high-quality content that was previously limited by real-person shooting conditions and difficult to realize to have the opportunity to be presented.
For example, in the past, for real-person micro-drama production, some micro-drama projects with themes such as fantasy, suspense, and historical time travel were difficult to achieve in a low-cost way, and required a huge production team, including the combination of leading actors, extras, offline scenes and many other elements to complete. Now with the help of AI, we can present more grand and more imaginative pictures at lower cost and higher efficiency, to meet the needs of traditional micro-drama users.
On the other hand, many traditional classic IPs are difficult to develop, so they were originally presented mainly in the form of animation and comics (I am also an animation enthusiast personally), but now through AI, they can be adapted into film and television works with more sense of reality that meet user needs.
Therefore, whether from the production side or the user side, AI plays a very big role.
I very much agree with the concept of "inflation" you mentioned. As an industry participant, Moment Interactive entered the micro-drama field in 2024. To be honest, we entered this track relatively late, especially in the real-person micro-drama field. From 2024 to 2025, we produced about 700 to 800 real-person micro-dramas. We also conducted surveys in Hengdian, Xi'an and Zhengzhou. At present, there are no more than 6 production companies in the whole industry, including us, that can achieve a monthly production capacity of more than 100 real-person micro-dramas. Therefore, the maximum daily production capacity of the entire real-person micro-drama industry is no more than 200.
However, as everyone just mentioned an astonishing data, with the advent of the AI era, the daily number of new micro-dramas launched has exceeded 1000, which is a very large increase. Such a large amount of content supply pouring into the market will definitely lead to "inflation" to a certain extent, and it will become more and more difficult to capture users' attention in general.
CHEN Meng: From the perspective of the entire micro-drama industry structure, platforms play a very important "hub" role, connecting upstream content producers and downstream consumers at the same time. How platforms view AI micro-dramas will also greatly affect the creative orientation of AI micro-dramas.
Teacher Cao is from the micro-drama business team of Tencent Video, and I am also curious about how your team views the "content inflation" trend caused by AI, and how you understand the value of AI micro-dramas to platform users?
CAO Rui: I personally am not willing to simply call them "AI micro-dramas", but prefer to understand this content form as "dramas produced with AI technology". Under this premise, we observe that the overall number of AI dramas is indeed increasing rapidly, and this increase is mainly due to two reasons.
The first aspect is that traditional film and television production institutions are embracing new technologies. We have observed in the industry that traditional film and television institutions have very high enthusiasm, and everyone hopes to use new AI technologies to improve some high-cost links in the past film and television production. After the application of AI technology, the overall production efficiency has indeed been greatly improved, and the production cycle of many dramas has been further shortened.
The second aspect is that we have been paying attention to the new production forces in the AI drama field. I have participated in some AI-related forums, and I have also found that there are many new creators in today's AI film and television dramas, especially micro-dramas. For example, now college students can use AI tools to produce a micro-drama, and some creators may be architects themselves, but with their own creative ideas, they can also complete micro-drama production through AI.
Therefore, from the production side, what we observe is that the number of production forces has increased and the production speed has become faster, which leads to the surge in the number of AI micro-dramas that everyone sees. Teacher Chen also mentioned earlier that users' consumption time is limited, with only 24 hours a day. When a huge amount of content keeps emerging, there will indeed be a phenomenon that "you can't finish watching all of them".
However, from the user side, we also observe that on long video platforms, whether for micro-dramas or medium and long dramas, users do not have a very obvious perceptual distinction on whether the content is produced by AI or uses AI technology. For users, they pay more attention to whether this drama is good-looking, whether it meets their own content consumption needs, and whether it is produced by AI is not the most important thing.
CHEN Meng: Thank you, Teacher Cao. Teacher Cao just mentioned a very important point, that is, the current rapid expansion of AI production capacity may come more from the supply-side push, while the demand is still in the process of verification.
From the discussion of the three experts, we can also feel that the current AI micro-dramas may still be in the early stage of development, and their creative paradigms, user needs and relevant policy norms are all in the process of dynamic change and exploration.
One thing that can be confirmed is that AI has brought a huge impact on production capacity, which will inevitably lead to changes in the "content value" of micro-dramas. When users "can't finish watching all the content", the value of some types of micro-dramas will decline, while the value of other types of micro-dramas may become more prominent.
New scarce resources: What are the core assets of the content industry in the AI era?
CHEN Meng: In addition to leading to changes in the value of content products, AI has also brought changes in the value of different industrial resources. A very typical trend is that when creative resources become easily accessible, everyone seems to be able to participate in micro-drama creation, and the scarcity of production resources has decreased significantly; conversely, what will become the new scarce resources in the industry? For example, are they distribution resources, technical resources, or some creative elements with more authenticity?
PENG Jin: I think the more scarce resources in the industry now may be good stories, stories that can really arouse people's empathy.
In our survey process in the past six months, we have a very obvious feeling — no matter big companies or small companies, when talking about production costs, they often say a sentence: "Good screenwriters are very expensive, good stories are very expensive." In addition, people who can embrace AI and use AI to present their ideas are also very valuable.
I think these three types of people they mentioned actually represent three different capabilities behind them: screenwriters represent good creative capabilities, good stories represent the ability to tell stories, and people who can present good stories with AI represent the ability to realize content. I think the value of the industry will