Short-Form Dramas Keep Popping Up... No Wonder: "1,519 Churned Out a Day"—Half of China's AI Tokens Go to Dramas

Zhongwen Online: "55% of AI tokens go to short-form dramas and video"
ByteDance counters: "10% of computing resources"
275,000 AI short-form dramas in the first half of the year

Controversy has erupted over statistics showing that more than half of China's artificial intelligence (AI) token usage goes toward producing short-form (short video) dramas.

Photo for illustrative purposes.

According to Chinese financial outlet Caixin and others on October 21, ChineseAll Digital Publishing Group, a company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, disclosed how China's AI token usage was divided by purpose in materials for an investor briefing last June. Generating short-form dramas and videos accounted for the largest share, at 55%, followed by marketing, including e-commerce and advertising, at 24%, and software development at 15%. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology also cited the same figures in a research report on the development of the token economy published last month.

A token is the basic unit an AI model uses to process information and serves as a measure of how much an AI service is used and how much it costs. Videos consume far more tokens than text or images. According to TokenHub, an AI model service platform, generating a five-second silent video at 1080p resolution with Kuaishou's Kling Video V3 model uses about 80,000 tokens per second. Creating a single image with a model in the same family requires about 20,000 tokens. Moreover, videos often have to be generated repeatedly until the desired scene appears, after which the best version is selected. Few dispute that short-form dramas therefore consume large amounts of tokens.

A photo of a short-form drama posted on Chinese video platform Bilibili, included to help illustrate the article. Bilibili

"Half of China's AI Goes to Short-Form Videos" Sparks Controversy... ByteDance Pushes Back

The controversy arose as the statistic spread online as meaning that "half of China's computing resources are used for short-form dramas." Chinese internet users compared it with claims that the United States uses 58% of its tokens for coding and work automation. Some even remarked, "(The Chinese) have used gunpowder to make fireworks in the AI era." The comment was self-deprecating, suggesting that, unlike the United States, which uses AI to boost productivity, China uses it to create entertainment. In response, ByteDance's AI service Doubao rebutted the claim, saying that "only about 10% of ByteDance's total computing resources are used to train and run video-generation models."

The large discrepancy between the two figures stems from the fact that they measure different things. ChineseAll Digital Publishing Group counted the number of tokens processed by AI models, while ByteDance measured how its total computing resources were allocated. Training an AI model initially requires a large amount of computing resources, but generates almost no tokens delivered to users as output. This has prompted criticism that high token usage does not necessarily mean that computing resources were used to the same extent.

ByteDance logo. Reuters-Yonhap News

Questions have also been raised about whether the 55% figure is representative of all of China. ChineseAll Digital Publishing Group is expanding its AI short-form drama business, and authoritative third-party statistics that objectively tally AI token usage by purpose are still scarce. The company said, "This statistic was calculated for the first quarter of this year by combining token usage during our AI content production process with external research reports."

AI Accounts for 95% of New Releases in Q1... China's Market Worth About KRW 19 Trillion

Regardless of the debate over these figures, AI short-form drama production is growing rapidly. According to the China Netcasting Services Association, more than 122,000 of the approximately 128,000 short-form dramas released in the first quarter of this year were made with AI, accounting for over 95%. A further 153,000 AI short-form dramas were added in the second quarter, bringing the first-half total to 275,000, or an average of 1,519 per day. Chinese media reported that 430,000 new short-form dramas were released from January through August this year, 13 times the total for all of last year. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 video-generation model, launched last February, accelerated this trend.

The market has also grown. According to a report published last April by the Development Research Center of China's National Radio and Television Administration and others, the global short-form drama market was worth about $18 billion (approximately KRW 24.3862 trillion) last year. China accounted for more than $14 billion (approximately KRW 18.9671 trillion), or 77.78%, of that total.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.