AI tools help content creators boost efficiency

In an office in Jiaxing, a city in Zhejiang province, content creators are turning scripts into video scenes with just a few clicks — no cameras, no sets, no actors — using self-developed artificial intelligence tools.

"Here, one person is a whole studio," said Wang Jiacheng, founder of Jiuzhou Culture Media. The company's AI short-drama production center now delivers a finished micro-drama in seven to 10 days, down from one to two months with traditional shooting. It is also done at a fraction of the cost, roughly 10,000 yuan ($1,488) versus hundreds of thousands previously.

With AI-powered tools, online novelists can become web series directors and game designers. Jiang Jiahua, CEO of a cultural technology firm named Haohao Jianghua, said: "Our newly developed AI-assisted audiovisual creation tool allows users with no prior experience to independently produce high-quality works." This lowers the technological barrier, opening up creativity to a wider talent pool.

This technology is part of a broader AI-driven transformation of China's cultural export engine, centered in East China's Zhejiang province. For decades, China relied on martial arts, food and Mandarin lessons as soft-power staples. Today, it is pushing a new trio of digital exports — online literature, web dramas and video games — with AI as the core enabler.

Language has long been the biggest hurdle. According to Chinese online literature provider Yuewen Group, AI now handles more than 80 percent of translated titles on its overseas bestseller lists.

Wang Zhongjie, general manager of overseas business at Yuewen, said that human translation was not only slow and limited in language coverage but also costly. "Now, with AI support, translation costs have dropped by 90 percent," Wang said.

By the end of June 2026, WebNovel, the group's overseas reading platform, had launched over 30,000 AI-translated works. These titles generated 40 percent of the platform's novel revenue, with income from less commonly spoken languages surging 160 percent year-on-year.

The film and television sector has also benefited from AI translation. Huace Group's in-house "Guose" large model, designed for overseas distribution, automates the entire pipeline — from content extraction and translation to target-language generation. This has boosted translation efficiency by 50 percent and cut translation and production costs by nearly 60 percent.

For instance, the TV series Flourished Peony, which has nearly 170,000 Chinese characters in subtitles and a total running time of 1,440 minutes, can have its subtitles translated in under a minute using the model. Meanwhile, the Swords into Plowshares TV series has rolled out multi-language versions across 37 countries with AI tools, reaching nearly 400 million viewers abroad.

The economics of AI are reshaping the entire value chain. A traditional micro-drama — from script to distribution — typically costs between 300,000 and 1 million yuan and takes one to two months. With AI, Jiuzhou Culture said it can complete a title in a week for about 10,000 yuan.

"AI doesn't compete with live-action dramas — it creates a new market," said an industry insider from the Qiantang district audiovisual industry association in Hangzhou.

The association noted that live-action dramas primarily target urban women aged 31-50, while AI-generated shorts appeal mostly to male university students aged 18-30. That means AI short dramas are not competing for an existing audience, but cultivating a new one.

In Qiantang district, AI short-drama production has soared. After the ByteDance video-generation model Seedance 2.0 launched in early 2026, daily AI drama output reached roughly 50 times that of live-action equivalents. Revenue at core district enterprises has grown at an average annual rate of 74 percent over the past two years. The sector now employs more than 10,000 people in the district.

According to the China Netcasting Services Association, about 128,000 micro-dramas were released industrywide in the first quarter, with AI-generated titles accounting for roughly 122,000 — over 95 percent of the total.

"How fast you deploy technology determines how high you start," said a Jiaxing city official involved in cultural industries. "This isn't a lab experiment — it's happening on factory floors and in daily production."

Startups are moving fast. Xinmei Hongxing, an AI short-drama studio set up in Qiantang district in December, produced its first hit within three months — a testament to what locals call "Qiantang speed".

"This is about shifting from follower to leader," said a Hangzhou official. "AI isn't just a tool, it's the future production line for cultural content."