Ninety-five percent of the roughly 128,000 short dramas published in China in the first quarter of 2026 were AI-generated. That’s the figure from the China Netcasting Services Association, and it lands harder when you set it against the year before: Q1 2026 alone produced three times as many short dramas as all of 2025.
The people who used to make those shows are still there. The jobs are the ones going missing.
The math stopped favoring humans
One minute of AI video now costs $90 to $120. That’s about 10 percent of what the same minute used to cost with human actors, Tsinghua University professor Shen Yang told the Financial Times.
No studio has to believe AI video is good to make that switch. It only has to be good enough, and cheap enough, which it now is. Since ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 arrived, digital performers can turn out better video faster and cheaper than the people they replace.
Here’s an example of what that output looks like in practice.
And the quality floor is not where it was even a few months ago. There are more realistic versions circulating too.
Sign the release, then clear your desk
The part of this that should bother you most isn’t the cost curve. It’s what performers are being asked to hand over on the way out the door.
Some are being pushed to “distil” their voice and likeness into AI tools before they’re fired. The training data walks out with the employer. The person doesn’t.
Lawyers say AI-related labor disputes have climbed over the past two to three years. That tracks with the timeline: the disputes started 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 small number
The short-drama industry employs 690,000 people directly in China. The bigger figure is livestreaming, where 15 million people list it as their primary job.
Fifteen million. That’s the population of a large country’s workforce sitting downstream of a tool that costs $90 a minute.
Actors, influencers and livestreamers are all in the same blast radius here, and some productions have already made the swap rather than talked about it.
The models didn’t stop at 2.0
Seedance 2.0 set the baseline. Seedance 2.5 and Wan 3.0 moved it again, with another jump in AI video quality.
If you want a number to watch, it isn’t the model version. It’s that 95 percent. When the share of AI-generated short dramas was small, you could call it a novelty tier that ran 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 that’s an order of magnitude below theirs.
