(Yicai) July 19 -- Chinese short-video platform operators Douyin and Kuaishou Technology this month launched mini drama series created with the help of artificial intelligence technologies.

Douyin and Bona Film Group debuted Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse at the Sanxingdui Cultural Relics Exhibition held at the Grand Canal Museum of Beijing on July 10. The series has 13 episodes of three to four minutes each.

AI iterations are very fast, a manager at Dreamina, an AI creation platform under ByteDance-owned Douyin, told Yicai. AI-generated content will become more mature and stable in the future, the person said.

For the production of Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse, Dreamina improved its AI technology by enhancing the video-generation function and adding horizontal and vertical movement of the lens to support the direction and amplitude control of the lens movement, he said.

AI is making a big impact on the entertainment industry’s operations, cost structure, and production cycle, but the technology is not yet fully mature as it still needs human input, insiders told Yicai.

Douyin rival Kuaishou also released an AI-generated mini-drama last weekend. Strange Mirror of Mountains and Seas: Travel Through Waves, a five episode adaptation of Chinese mythology book Classic of Mountains and Seas, has already clocked up nearly 7.5 million views.

At the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference earlier this month, Beijing-based Kuaishou showcased its comprehensive AI model matrix, including image generation model Kolors and video creation model Kling.

The production team behind Strange Mirror of Mountains and Seas started working on it after signing a deal with Kuaishou in the first half of the year, Director Chen Kun said. The mini-drama cost less than a quarter of the traditional production process, he added.

AI technologies did not do everything, as the series still needed human authors to write an initial script and do the post-production editing, Chen pointed out. But AI can greatly enhance the specific efficiency of shooting, costume, make-up, and prop design, lighting, and stage art construction.

Strange Mirror of Mountains and Seas did not use text-to-video, but text-to-picture and then picture-to-video technologies, Chen explained. Film and drama production requires consistent characters, scenes, and style, which the current text-to-video technology cannot guarantee, he noted.

Chen believes that AI-generated movies and dramas are not much better than traditional ones in terms of visual effects. He looks forward to AI-native technical development to achieve highly controllable and accurate production effects, but it will take some time.

Editor: Futura Costaglione