89 of Douyin's top 100 animated dramas in May were AI: FT

89 of the top 100 animated dramas on Douyin in May were AI productions, according to the market-research firm DataEye, in figures picked up this week by the Financial Times. In August 2025 Douyin took in 655 new AI dramas. A year later it took in 74,313, or 75.4% of new titles that month.

The engine behind the jump is ByteDance's own video model, Seedance 2.0, released in February. A short-drama actor and producer told the FT he had been shooting three productions a week before it came out. Afterwards "everything just went," he said, and many of his friends had to leave the profession. Actors in Hengdian, the Chinese production hub, began posting videos on Douyin complaining about not getting any work shortly after the 2026 Spring Festival. Techmeme's summary of the FT piece put it flatly: "Online performers left jobless as new video-generation programmes sweep industry."

DataEye's numbers for the first half of the year put around 220,000 new AI-generated microdramas on Douyin, drawing roughly 500 billion views between them. Only 0.48% (1,055 titles) individually cleared 100 million views. A three-to-five-minute drama that took five people and roughly three months to make in 2024 can now be produced by a single employee in one or two days.

Some performers are being asked to "distill" their images, voices and acting styles into AI systems before losing their jobs. One children's educational-program host told the FT she was pressured to consent to an AI replica of herself or risk being replaced by other actors. The story lands on the back of a run of AI-video coverage on our ByteDance tracker, including Bloomberg's finding that Chinese labs hold nine of the top ten text-to-video slots, and echoes the Guardian's recent piece on sidelined Hollywood creatives now training AI models.