For 4,000 Yuan, a Chengdu Designer Made a 96-Episode AI Drama With 600 Million Views
A 40-year-old former furniture designer spent 4,000 yuan and six weeks making a 96-episode AI-generated drama that has been watched more than 600 million times. His success is the industry's newest promise — and, as the overnight takedown of a Dream of the Red Chamber copycat shows, its newest legal problem.
The economics of China's AI short-drama boom keep getting more extreme. The latest case: a 40-year-old furniture designer from Chengdu, Bai Feikong, who quit his job and spent 4,000 yuan — about 560 US dollars — making a 96-episode AI-generated drama. Six weeks of production, and the result, a revenge-rebirth fantasy titled Reborn Mantis: Awaken Infinite Devouring Evolution, has racked up more than 600 million views. His update queue, he told the outlet that broke the story, is now too long to answer.
The site has tracked this industry's production economics and its creative casualties, but the scale of Bai's budget is still the story: a professionally produced micro-drama used to cost tens of thousands of yuan per episode. AI has collapsed that to a rounding error, and as the site's earlier coverage noted, nine in ten of China's new short dramas are now made by AI.
His success is being read as a new career path for a generation of designers who trained in the old economy and are running out of jobs to train for. The rave reviews — "this short drama is killing me" — are the story's public face, and the second season is already in production.
The legal counterpoint arrived the same day. An AI drama titled Dreaming Back to the Red Chamber, which appeared on Baidu's trending list, was pulled overnight after lawyers flagged that it had used the likenesses of 17 actors from the 1987 television adaptation — a violation of portrait rights and, in some cases, the posthumous rights of the deceased. This is the same legal theory that actress Zhao Liying invoked when she sued the operator of Hongguo, China's biggest short-drama app, over an AI-cloned likeness of herself.
The regulators' sweep against AI micro-dramas has been running since the fall, and the Red Chamber takedown is the newest enforcement action. The two stories — Bai's low-budget success and the Red Chamber takedown — are the same industry: the tools are now cheap enough that a single hobbyist can build a 600-million-view business from a laptop, and the same tools can clone a beloved 1987 performance without a contract. The market is growing faster than the rules that govern it.