The viral short dramas are increasingly being created entirely with AI, with hundreds of new shows spun up each day.

In a dimly lit bedroom, a frightened young woman is thrown onto a bed by a tall, muscular man. He grabs her hand, and flame-like vines crawl across her body, fusing with her flesh. She levitates, then drops. A dragon-shaped tattoo appears across her chest. “Two months,” the man says. “Give me an heir, or I will eat you.”

This scene is from Carrying the Dragon King's Baby, one of the many hundreds of short dramas that appear on apps like DramaWave and ReelShort. The show’s odd visual texture, a mix between a movie and a video game cutscene, hints at its AI-generated origins.

The trend has boomed since 2018, with China's short drama market reaching $6.9 billion in revenue in 2024. Now, driven by aggressive expansion overseas, these dramas are produced faster and cheaper using generative AI. An average of 470 AI-generated short dramas were released every day in January.

“People’s attention spans are getting shorter, and serialized drama naturally has to get shorter,” says Han “Daniel” Fang, CEO of Kunlun Tech. The company now offers more than 1,000 AI titles on its platforms, shifting from traditional productions to a mix of AI-generated content.