Actress Qi Wei gives AI her face and a future

It's a futuristic world no one would want to live in. Amid the ruins of buildings and scorched earth, a young woman races down a street, pulls out a gun and fires at her pursuers. Agile and swift as a leopard, she moves with startling precision.

Her name is Han Qingxia, the digital avatar of singer-actress Qi Wei. In early August, the 41-year-old star became the first actress on the Chinese mainland to publicly announce that she had authorized the use of her AI-generated likeness, marking a pioneering step at the intersection of entertainment and artificial intelligence.

Qi brought the idea into the spotlight at the ongoing 83rd Venice International Film Festival, where she attended an international panel discussion on AI cinema and exchanged views on the emerging technology with fellow creators.

"Many industry insiders overseas are discussing both the technical and artistic aspects of AI-generated content. I believe this new era, reshaped by AI, is surging across the world and will transform the global film and television industry," Qi said in an online interview with China Daily.

Her own experiment with the technology is Reborn, a sci-fi micro-short drama featuring Han as its protagonist.

Adapted from writer Zhou Dabai's online novel of the same title, published on the internet literature platform Fanqie Novel, the story follows Han, a young woman who mysteriously returns to life after struggling to survive during the final decade before the end of the world. Gifted with the ability to foresee the future, she prepares for the apocalypse by building a shelter to survive zombie sieges.

For Qi, the decision to use AIGC technology was driven partly by the practical challenges. "I fell in love with this story when my team acquired the adaptation rights to the novel. Originally, I planned to play the protagonist myself, but bringing such an apocalyptic story to life would require a huge budget. Honestly, we couldn't afford it, so we abandoned the idea of making it as a live-action production," Qi recalled.