China's booming short drama industry — worth $6.9 billion in 2024 — is rapidly embracing generative AI to produce ultrashort, melodramatic mobile series faster and far more cheaply, with some platforms releasing hundreds of AI-generated titles daily. AI has slashed production costs by up to 90% and compressed timelines from months to weeks, eliminating most traditional crew roles and replacing them with smaller teams of writers and "AI asset curators" who generate scenes via prompts. While the shift is accelerating content output and enabling previously expensive genres like fantasy, it is also disrupting workers, with screenwriters seeing rates fall and projects cancelled as the industry reorganises itself around algorithmic, AI-driven production.
