Of the roughly 128,000 short dramas published in China during the first quarter of 2026, 95 percent were AI-generated, according to the China Netcasting Services Association. The context makes the figure sting: Q1 2026 on its own turned out three times as many short dramas as the whole of 2025.
The people who used to make those shows haven’t gone anywhere. Their jobs have.
The economics stopped favoring humans
A minute of AI video now runs $90 to $120 — roughly 10 percent of what that same minute used to cost with human actors, Tsinghua University professor Shen Yang told the Financial Times.
A studio doesn’t need to believe AI video is good in order to make the switch. Good enough at a low enough price is sufficient, and that bar has been cleared. Ever since ByteDance shipped Seedance 2.0, digital performers have been producing better footage, faster and cheaper, than the people they displace.
Here is what that output looks like in practice.
And the quality floor has moved sharply in a matter of months. More lifelike versions are circulating as well.
Hand over the likeness, then clear the desk
The cost curve isn’t the part that should trouble you most. What performers are being asked to surrender on their way out the door is.
Some are being pressured to “distil” their voice and likeness into AI tools before they are fired. The training data leaves with the employer. The person doesn’t.
Lawyers say AI-related labor disputes have risen over the past two to three years. That fits the timeline: the cases began stacking up well before the models got good, which suggests the fights were about contracts and consent long before they were about quality.
690,000 people — and that’s the smaller number
China's short-drama industry directly employs 690,000 people. The larger figure belongs to livestreaming, where 15 million people list it as their primary job.
Fifteen million. That is the size of a large country’s workforce, sitting downstream of a tool that costs $90 a minute.
Actors, influencers and livestreamers all occupy the same blast radius, and some productions have already made the swap rather than merely talked about it.
The models didn’t stop at 2.0
Seedance 2.0 set the baseline. Seedance 2.5 and Wan 3.0 shifted it again, bringing another jump in AI video quality.
If you want a number to watch, it isn’t the model version. It’s that 95 percent. Back when the share of AI-generated short dramas was small, you could write it off as a novelty tier running alongside the real one. At 95 percent, the human-made short drama is the exception, and the 690,000 people making them are competing against a cost structure an order of magnitude below their own.