China's AI Short-Drama Studios Are Cutting Out the Entry-Level Job
A viral account of a friend's AI short-drama studio — twenty-odd staff, work managed by the Codex agent, and no base roles — lands amid industry numbers showing crews shrinking from thirty to five, layoffs above eighty percent, and hybrid AI skills paying up to 60,000 yuan a month.
The studio a young Chinese professional visited this week did not look like the future of a labour-intensive industry. It occupies a new 1,800-square-metre office. It has around twenty employees. And it has almost no junior staff at all.
The account, a post liked more than 7,000 times, describes a friend's company that used to shoot short dramas with real actors. This year it was acquired by a large conglomerate, given new offices and a new team, and switched entirely to AI-generated dramas and animated shorts — plus promotional films for corporate clients. The visitor was stunned by the sample reels: scenes and effects at near-full realism, produced for roughly 5,000 to 6,000 yuan per half-minute of finished footage. The production pipeline is run through Codex, the AI coding agent, which handles the base work; what remains for humans are management, technical and sales roles, and the company is still hiring — for those three functions only.
The numbers circulating with the story suggest this is not one studio's eccentricity. A widely shared industry summary puts it bluntly: a live-action short-drama crew once numbered thirty to forty people — extras, lighting, stage hands — while AI-driven teams now finish full productions with three to five, and some companies have cut headcount by more than eighty percent. The demand that remains is concentrated at the top: people who combine editorial judgement with prompt-writing and model-tuning skills are described as scarce, and can command salaries of up to 60,000 yuan a month. The floor of the industry is thinning while its ceiling rises.
The context is a business that China has watched balloon for three years. Half the country's AI compute is already busy making short dramas, and platforms have billed their oldest fans hundreds of thousands of yuan for them — a market big enough that its labour practices matter well beyond the industry. Beijing has noticed the employment question too: the State Council told employers in October to slow down AI's replacement of workers.
The reactions underneath the viral post were less about marvel than arithmetic. 'The only bug is: if people have no jobs, what happens to the demand side?' one commenter asked — noting that their own company had cut two-thirds of its staff since the pandemic, from the downturn and from AI taking over base roles. The studio in the story is still hiring, for management, technology and sales. There is no word of a role for anyone who used to do the rest.