While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China's Film Industry is Embracing It
The Los Angeles Times reports: Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen's role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of…
China's film industry is eagerly embracing artificial intelligence, according to the Los Angeles Times. Actor Chen Yilong recently signed a contract to license his image for use in an AI-generated movie. Chen will sit in front of a camera and make facial expressions at the director's prompt, allowing artificial intelligence to create a digital human avatar to star in the film. Chen, who works in Beijing, believes that if you can't beat AI, you might as well join it.
China's film and video industry is being transformed by AI-driven storytelling, driven by advances in video generation software. At the forefront are micro dramas, typically one to two minutes long, popular among Chinese audiences. The cost of producing these videos has been dramatically reduced through AI software developed by Chinese tech giants like Kuaishou Technology and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.
Micro dramas surged to 128,000 in the first three months of the year, with over 95% being produced with AI, according to the China Netcasting Services Association. Feixiang Universe, a Shenzhen-based studio founded by Sun Wei, created a Tang Dynasty-set film using AI. Sun cited the fear of "stealing someone's face" as a reason to license real people's likenesses for the AI production.
Sun's studio faces challenges as AI-generated performers tend to have similar features, leading them to cast a wide net to find diverse faces and digitize actor expressions. Director Lu Beike found AI-generated scenes for his big-budget series "Three-Body" sub-standard, stating that real human performances carried more nuance and emotion. However, producing a 90-minute AI film for $500,000, which previously cost millions, excites Sun's team.
They work with AI tools like ChatGPT, Kimi, or DeepSeek to develop entire screenplays from short paragraphs. Sun's team then uses Chinese video-generation models to input desired scenes, backgrounds, and performers, with AI generating 15 seconds of footage each time. Chinese companies selling AI-powered video-generation software are now seeking opportunities in Hollywood, potentially upending the industry in the United States.
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