From 2025 to 2026, AIGC has been reshaping the supply structure of mini-dramas. Motion comics, comedic “shadiao” (absurdist) animations, AI animations and AI live-action short dramas have been launched in quick succession, platforms have rolled out a wave of support programs, and the barrier to entry for creators has dropped significantly. Public reports show that in the first half of 2026, new native AI dramas and animated dramas launched on Douyin alone numbered in the hundreds of thousands, with the related user base expanding several-fold compared with 2025. Many institutions also regard animated dramas as a second growth curve, with market growth clearly outpacing the short-drama sector as a whole.
However, “explosive output” and “commercial returns” are out of step. Media reports citing industry data indicate that among the large number of new AI dramas, only a very small fraction break even, while the vast majority struggle to reach profitability within six months. Low costs have multiplied supply but also diluted the traffic each individual title can capture. The per-minute production cost of a mid-tier AI animated drama can be as low as roughly one-fifth that of a live-action short drama, yet formulaic themes, inconsistent characters and settings, and weak emotional performances continue to hold back completion rates and paid conversion.
Under the Measures for the Administration of Mini-Drama Development, AI-generated or AI-produced content must carry a prominent disclosure label in each episode, in line with the requirements for labeling AI-generated and synthetic content. In other words, “being able to generate” is no longer a competitive advantage—“being compliant, telling a good story and building IP” is.
HESHU Insight: AI is well suited to amplifying production capacity, not to replacing scriptwriting and aesthetic judgment. For producers, a more pragmatic path is to embed AIGC in localization, dubbing, rough cuts, multilingual versioning and selected visual-generation stages, in service of premium live-action productions and overseas localization—while rigorously selecting stories and characters that can be developed into copyrightable IP, to avoid a race to the bottom in which “the more titles are released, the harder it is for each one to earn.”