<\/p>\n
The scene is from Carrying the Dragon King\u2019s Baby<\/em>, one of the many hundreds of short dramas that appear on apps like DramaWave and ReelShort. There\u2019s just something about this one that isn\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s because Carrying the Dragon King\u2019s Baby <\/em>is part of a new trend for making these shows entirely with AI: no actors, camera operators, cinematographers, or CGI specialists required.<\/p>\n China\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s short drama market reached roughly $6.9 billion in revenue, surpassing the country\u2019s annual box office earnings for the first time.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Now the industry is reinventing itself. Chinese short drama companies\u2014already masters of low-budget, algorithmically optimized entertainment\u2014are 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.<\/p>\n Short dramas are already famously low-budget. But AI has made them dramatically cheaper to mass-produce, helping to accelerate the entire process\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 apps. Decisions about what to produce next are often driven less by creative instinct than by performance data. \u201cWe look at what themes, plotlines, and writers resonate with audiences, then quickly adjust,\u201d says Tang.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n #Chinese #short #dramas #content #machines<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The scene is from Carrying the Dragon King\u2019s Baby, one of the many hundreds of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[388,3350,8453,8454,1235,8451,8452],"class_list":["post-10314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-chinese","tag-content","tag-dramas","tag-machines","tag-short","tag-the-viral-short-dramas-are-increasingly-being-created-entirely-with-ai","tag-with-hundreds-of-new-shows-spun-up-each-day"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp.jpeg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp-150x150.jpeg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp-300x150.jpeg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp-768x384.jpeg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp-1024x512.jpeg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp.jpeg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp.jpeg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp-1024x512.jpeg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260424_Cdrama.webp-540x340.jpeg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Infinite stories, infinite tropes<\/strong><\/h3>\n