On this topic, I just stumbled upon an extraordinary number released by China's National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA): 430,000 micro-dramas (short TV series) went online in China in the first 8 months of 2026, and over 90% of them were AI-made ( 🤯 And micro-dramas aren't a micro-phenomenon in China: still according to the NRTA, they're watched by 800 million people - a good majority of the population - and the market passed 100 billion yuan last year, about twice China's cinema box office ( Which means that, that's it, we're there: the majority of new TV-style series in the world's largest market are made by AI. I knew anecdotally that AI entertainment content was big in China (hence my casual take last night 👇) but I'm genuinely awed by the scale and speed of it: AI dramas were virtually non-existent at the beginning of last year and, fast forward a year, it's now human-made dramas that are the exception! To be clear, this is about what gets made: many of these AI dramas are - like YouTube videos - made by everyday folks and don't that much viewership. But that's how every creator economy works: a long tail few people watch, and a handful of hits that reach hundreds of millions. This might possibly become China's answer to Hollywood. We're talking immense production cost advantages: the cost per minute of footage for AI micro-dramas is roughly 1,000 yuan ($140, while your typical Netflix drama costs $5M to $10M per hour-long episode, so $85,000 to $170,000 a minute. In other words, it's roughly a thousand times cheaper to produce. And there are other advantages too: with AI, it's ridiculously easy to re-render the footage with local faces, languages and other local cultural characteristics for every single international market at near-zero cost. Which would be something Hollywood never had: a culture-neutral fiction factory. All the more because we're also starting to see full-length AI dramas appear. In fact, just 3 weeks ago, Hunan TV, one of China's biggest channels, began airing in prime time "Hou Xiyou Ji" ("The Later Journey to the West"): a 30-episode series of 40 minutes each, entirely AI-generated, without a single human actor. You can watch the first episode here in full: and see for yourself that it looks remarkably well made. It went from approval to broadcast in just under 4 months and, according to the series' director Li Dongshen, costs about 900,000 yuan per episode to make ($135,000), or 50 times less than your typical Netflix series ( And it did very well: it topped its time slot among provincial satellite channels five nights running, passed 150 million plays on Mango TV in its first five days, and sent Mango Excellent Media's stock up 44% in two days, adding over 11 billion yuan to its market value ( Bear in mind that at the beginning of 2025 the technology could not do this at all (back then, no-one could produce more than a few seconds of coherent AI video, let alone a 40-minute episode with consistent characters) so it's an understatement to say that things are moving fast. Imagine where this will be in another 18 months: today is the worst AI dramas will ever look. Interestingly, this technology is overwhelmingly Chinese. Where China is roughly on par vs the West for frontier LLMs, it is clearly ahead in AI video: on the main blind-test leaderboards ( out of the 10 top spots, 9 are held by Chinese models (ByteDance's Seedance, Alibaba's Wan, MAGI-2, Minimax), with Google the only Western lab still in the race. And they've clearly unlocked some sort of flywheel which gives them a considerable advantage: the companies building the models are the same ones that own the platforms where the content gets watched. ByteDance makes Seedance and owns Douyin and Hongguo, China's biggest micro-drama app. Alibaba makes Wan and owns Youku. Kuaishou makes Kling and owns, well, Kuaishou. So hundreds of thousands of AI dramas get made with their models, then watched by 800 million people on their app. Better models make better dramas, better dramas bring more viewers and more creators, and round it goes. No Western lab has anything like it: OpenAI had a model - Sora, being discontinued this very week ( - but no audience, and Netflix has an audience but no model. Only Google has Youtube but, so far, it strangely doesn't seem to have connected the pieces: it has the best video model in the West and the biggest video audience in the world, but no serialized drama format built on top. If anyone in the West can replicate the Chinese flywheel, it's them. But for now, they haven't. In any case, long story short, what this all means is that the entertainment industry, in Hollywood and elsewhere, is on the cusp of being seriously disrupted, and its epicenter is China. Humans won't disappear from the process - even in China, the regulator's line is that "AI is a tool, humans are the creators" ( - but it matters a great deal which humans, and whose tools, and it looks increasingly like the next generation of storytellers will either be Chinese or using Chinese tools.