文 | 靠谱的阿星
晚上12点，你决定刷完这一集就睡：
新郎抛下婚礼去机场接白月光，新娘转头就赌气让前来跑腿的快递小哥去接亲，并且直接拉上假新郎去领了证。谁料快递小哥的隐藏身份，竟是裴氏集团失散多年的继承人。一刷就是80多集，原来是两个失散多年的发小。
另一部剧里，女生从小学渣姐姐学霸，可惜全家宠爱姐姐，嘲讽妹妹，没有想到妹妹实际上考了708分，悄悄报了国防科工大学，在全家嘲讽奚落声之中，女生男朋友还被姐姐给抢走了.......
刷着还不够，一个心地善良柴夫上山救了一条白龙，白龙为了报恩给小伙一块玉石，并且告诉他要买下远处那块已经被旷工挖空的山，小伙换了500两银子修缮了房屋，还买了一块山，签好了地契，开启了他富可敌国的生涯。
......
三个短剧忍不住刷完，已经晚上2点了。
你明知剧情狗血，明知该睡了，手指却不受控制地滑向了下一集，每一集之中见还忍受了8秒钟的广告。
现在短剧的确跟以前已经大不一样了。
从霸总爱上我，下岗带娃被富豪选上，再到震撼夏国神秘人物师尊，其实是某个被人看不起的赘婿这些离谱剧情和通用模板，逐渐开始精细区分人群了，针对不同的普通人物的定身打造人设故事，虽然大多离不开主角已经受欺负、受打压、委屈，不公，歧视，然后逆袭，隐藏身份，最后亮瞎所有狗眼看人低的东西的惊天反转，这个总的短剧特色。
这些爆款的短剧受吸引的受众，并不能完全批判视角来——因为人群实在庞大。
根据国家广播电视总局9月17日国新办发布会公布的数据：2026年前8个月，全国上线微短剧43万部，是去年全年的13倍，其中AI剧占比超过九成。全国微短剧用户规模已达8.51亿，占网民总数的66.7%。2025年，微短剧市场规模正式突破千亿元。
今年春节档，从小年到正月初七，红果短剧App累计观看人次达6亿，贡献193亿总观看量——作为对比，同期全国电影春节档观影人次为1.87亿。红果短剧的日活已攀升至1.68亿，同比增长107%，人均单日停留时长125分钟。
由此可见，短剧内容消遣已经是国民级的了，年轻人用它打发通勤，中年人用它消解班味，长辈用它填满退休后的午后。
这是在AI短剧逐渐在规律上已经完胜整个真人短剧产业链之后，实现一次爆发；而被AI短剧的爽点和短剧故事灵魂牵引的另一端，是一群生产着成瘾内容、自己也深陷行业旋涡的活生生的人。
这段时间，公众号【靠谱的阿星】先后约见了做AI短剧的朋友，实地走访了不同规模的做AI短剧的团队，我发现，AI的确下探了做短剧的门槛，并且从根本上或升级或重塑了整个产业链。
一、锋哥的爆款培训课：每集都是“情绪电击”
我是经过圈内朋友锋哥的，他是现在炙手可热的AI短剧风口的一个小老板，一开始他以为我是同行，我说，我是看我爸妈现在痴迷这个所以特别想了解这行的魔力，当然我自己对于短剧态度还好，不是太反感，当然也还没有达到沉迷的地步。
锋哥见我说话实在，而且我们年级相仿，他是之前做电视行业编导的，后来做了短视频，再现在投身在AI短剧这个行业创业了，并且拿到了结果，他还跟我展示了他的爆款作品，其中一部就是我在文章开头分享的故事。于是他邀请我在某个他跟新员工培训的时候去听一听，顺便等于给我做了采访，这样节省时间，因为他现在确实非常忙。
我按照约定到位于汉口武商广场的写字楼他的公司，打了一个招呼之后，我坐在角落里听他培训，只见他在白板上画着密密麻麻的流程图，标题是“剧本拆分”。
锋哥带着一个白鸭舌帽，语气却不容商量：“你们记住，短剧不同于电视剧或者电影，讲一个太长的故事，观众选择我们的时间不超过1分钟，我要做的是管理观众的多巴胺。”
锋哥用马克笔敲了敲白板，“一部长剧80集，每集90秒，总共120分钟。你要做的就是把这120分钟在做剧本上就切成80个‘情绪电流点’。”
他擦点了白板上的提纲，又画了一条起伏的波浪线，标注出每一个关键节点：
第1集（黄金三秒）：开屏就砸猛料，剧烈冲突——当众悔婚、豪门羞辱、绝症诊断书、捉奸现场、开灵视洞察阴谋等。开篇7秒内若无“悬念钩子+情绪爆点”，用户留存率直接跌至41%，成败在此一举！形成强烈的共情。
第3-5集：第一次反转——让用户跟随主角的内心独白，选择进行觉醒、或者女主男主身份暴露、贵人突然现身、或者被人栽赃陷害，这个时候要把用户进入故事线之中。
第10集：第一个小高潮——反派初次被打脸，但立刻埋下新的更大危机。
第20-30集：中段拉扯——误会、分离、打压、第三者介入、变量加入，持续制造“憋屈感”，把观众的情绪压到最低。
第50集：真相即将揭晓的瞬间切断画面；反角开始遭受惩罚，但是具体如何处罚交给主角来选择，人最难抵抗的是“已经知道一半”的状态。
第75-79集：终极反转前的铺垫，每集结尾都卡在“门刚推开”“话刚说出口”的临界点。
第80集：大结局落地，但必须留一个开放式尾巴，为第二季铺路。
“每一集的结尾，”锋哥说，“必须让观众产生一种生理上的不适——就像打喷嚏打到一半被人捂住嘴。他们必须点开下一集才能‘打完这个喷嚏’。”
台下有学员问：如果观众看到中途不想看退出了不刷下去怎么办？ 锋哥笑了：“所以我们有‘爽点密度’的硬要求——每15秒必须有一个情绪峰值，每集必须有一次反转。这种节奏能精准触发大脑感觉机制，连续观看30分钟，多巴胺水平比看完一部普通电影高出47%。你不是在跟观众的意志力对抗，你实际上是在跟他们的神经回路合作。”
有人小声说：听起来不像是创作，更像是做神经工程。 锋哥拍了拍白板：“准确地说，是情绪工程学。这是行业跑出来的标准答案，你可以不认同，但数据不会骗人。”
锋哥接着说：“我们每天都要泡在短剧里面，尤其是大家觉得特别精彩的短剧一定要认真分析，然后想想如果是你自己制作会怎么写这个脚本，为了方便大家理解这个行业，我们会把市面上的短剧录屏直接存在公司共享网盘里面，然后把文案全部扒下来，进行逐字逐句的研读和分析。当我们扒下来的类似的剧本多了的时候，我们就可以找到其中规律了。”
锋哥最后说，短剧是比电视剧电影更好玩的，强调我们赶上了好时代，现在是一个风口，只要学会这个，出去之后找工作随便找！这才是这个时代真正普通人改命的东西！讲到这里，六七个学员们激动的鼓掌！出于礼貌，我也跟着鼓掌了！
我跟着锋哥在办公室里面转了一下，大概40平的办公室，其实都是台式电脑，比做直播间的团队其实设备还简单，确实主要还是AI内容产业，锋哥说短剧最核心还是故事选题，希望跟我有机会合作一起打磨好的剧本。我说我的网感不行，他说干着干着就会了！
二、阿松：从“写脚本”到“搭积木”的剧本撰稿师
阿松在光谷一家内容工作室做策划，今年28岁，华师中文系毕业，本来他想当老师的，可惜分配偏远的农村教书几年，工资实在太低，还没有结婚，就想到转行，他的文笔实在很好，发表过几本网络小说。
去年年从长江文艺出版社编辑（没有编制）看准机会跳槽入行进入了AI短剧这个行业写剧本。听说我认识长江文艺其他编辑老师介绍来的，还公开出过一本书，直到我对于这个行业感兴趣，所以对我还是比较重视。我请他到他公司楼下的星巴克喝咖啡，然后就聊起了他的工作。
我比较直接，上来就问他的收入。让我意外的是，阿松的现在底薪也不高，一个月只有8000，需要每上线一部剧按照每一集流量破十万之后每集多10块钱拿提成，如果单部播放破千万，会有额外奖金500元创作鼓励奖。直接把我惊得目瞪口呆。然后短剧的流量大的这么不值钱！
上个月，他随手改的一部“重生本”跑成了小爆款，底薪分成加奖金拿了一万二，那是他入行以来收入最高的一个月，高兴了整整一周。
但转头他又扎进了下一部“换皮剧本”里，他告诉我：“爆款是运气，流水线才是饭碗。”
这确实可以理解，因为他并不是编剧出身，甚至他从来没有进过影视行业，对于内容创作掌握，完全是靠他几本网络小说写的流量还是还算可以，被招进来试试的。但是他又特别缺钱，想存钱早点结婚，发誓一定要证明自己。
每天到岗，基本上就是用deepseek和豆包写AI短剧，输入的关键词，基本上是与他自己最近追的AI短剧有关，把关键词提炼出来之后，他自己就换名字，换地点，换身份，换时代背景，换打压点、委屈点、施虐-受虐的对象，问AI如何设置更多的爽点以及反转套路。
十分钟过后，屏幕上出现一万字的剧本初稿。显然他已经完全忘记了他是中文系毕业以后要当作家的梦想，他说，“投身AI短剧的人，没有梦想，只有对于流量的饥渴”！
剩下的他工作就是要在这一周之内把AI生成的初稿“修剪”成符合80集钩子标准的样子，意味着每天必须要完成至少20集的脚本写作，这已经是跟AI合作磨合的极限了，国产AI大模型基本上他都是付费会员了。在周五的时候要交出去。阿松管这叫“模块组装”：
模块A：憋屈（被羞辱、被误解、被抛弃）
模块B：反转（身份揭晓、能力觉醒、贵人出现）
模块C：打脸（反派下跪、众人震惊、前任后悔）
模块D：新悬念（更大的秘密、更危险的敌人）
“今天把‘首富千金’换成‘战神归来’，明天把‘婆婆’换成‘恶毒闺蜜’，内核完全一样。”阿松说，“这个就是拼装，你也可以理解成为换皮。用户并不在乎皮，他们在乎爽点有没有按时到账。”
阿松一个月要产出四剧的剧本量，但是他的速度已经很慢了，因为团队出来一个月才能上架一部，意味着他的收入还是比较低，如果他增加工作量同时创造3条故事线，让不同的大模型去跑；再逐一去搭建钩子+爽点去创作的话，意味着一个月的交出来的剧本数量要是3个以上，而且如果抄袭太狠的话，肯定也无法通过，浪费公司后期制作投入。如何在保证质量以及数量之间做出平衡。他说现在只能菜就多练了！
我问他想不想做出一些有文学素养高的作品，他像是嘲笑又失望的表现跟我说：“那是你不懂这个行业！短剧就跟速成鸡一样，比肯德基标准化还要快，你说的那种属于养凤凰的模式。”他接着补充道，
“要做一部精品AI剧，其实剧本就得花大力气打磨，这个就需要花费创作非常大的心血，而且难得是后期制作成本会很好，无论是美术设计，还是动画制作，在消耗token以及算力上就是我们的普通爽剧的十几倍。更关键的是，没人敢保证流量，现在时间不等人，所有人赶进度都是求快！否则就被同行直接甩的老远了！”
三、乐乐：六张脸，两千部剧，月薪五千
乐乐，在汉阳文创园一个AI短剧作坊里面做剪辑，大专学历，一个月的月薪五千。这家作坊连老板在内一共三个人，主打极致低成本路线。作为一个05后走向职场，其实他倒没有什么规划，工资低无所谓反正刚毕业，就是觉得离家近，但是让他没有想到的是，之前有一个师傅带他，可惜觉得工资太低已经辞职了，这导致乐乐现在一个月钱拿的不多，还需要经常加班。还在经过4个月的魔鬼式训练，他已经成为一个有经验的短剧剪辑师。
与其说是剪辑，不如说是AIGC工作，主要剪辑工具就是剪映，之前的师傅留下的素材基本上就在电脑里面存在，他剪去剪来都是同样的“老演员”了——也就是各个短剧烂大街的那种AI生成面孔，分别对应霸总、战神、小白花、恶毒女配、萌宝、慈母六种经典人设。
这六张脸每天在不同的剧本里“活着”，周一演渣男，周二演深情男主，周三变成长辈。 “这几张脸，累计已经‘演’了两千多部短剧了。”
现在是出于控成本角度来生产，所以他们不用高精度模型，不用定制人脸，就靠六张固定脸循环用，场景素材全从公共素材库扒，一部80集的剧，算力成本控制在5000块以内；而其中主要的成本是token费用，也就是在各个大模型里面充值费用。
乐乐工作就是把定稿的剧本，逐字逐句喂给即梦AI生存动画，然后用剪映来剪辑，一集剪辑完就直接交给文案剧本去核实，确认没有问题之后就直接发送，这个“质检”工作其实可有可无，乐乐说：
“有时候发现AI把人脸正反面都分不清楚，有的是画面文字根本就是错的，有的情绪也有不对的，有时候都能够被AI气哭了，后来想想也没有人真正在意。”
我问乐仔，那你不觉得有点草率吗？ 他说“一天出20集，脸不崩能看就行，现在老板要的是效率，要走量，精细就很难了”，“再说了老板只给了五千一个月的工资，token费用他也给的不多，还是得他报销呢！”
四、短剧如何赚钱？
平台当然是稳赚不赔的了！赚了注意力，有了流量就有广告商投钱。严格的说，短剧从业者都是平台打工人。
调研了一圈下来，我发现现在AI短剧实际上吃的是之前真人短剧行业的流量红利。
真人短剧把用户观看人群、剧本套路、流量密码、流量平台都探索出来了，只是成本太高，真人拍摄短剧，演员的工资、化妆师、灯光、后期制作，场地费用、剧本版权，一集下来就得10万的成本，而AI短剧严格的是只需要一个文案、一个剪辑就可以完成，有的一个人借助于大模型的token就可以处理，成本直接降到了一集0.1万元到1万左右，直接降低了十倍到百倍，这导致只有真正已经跑通了商业模式的头部真人短剧机构才能存活，大量的短剧行业从业者实际上都被迫转向了AI短剧了。
AI短剧相对于真人短剧最大优势就是免费，而精品的短剧现在实际上已经接近于电影级别画质了。
而AI短剧主要收入实际上是依靠平台的流量广告分成来维持，流量高则分配的每千人观看的广告流量费用就相对多，这样完全可以覆盖短剧投入产生的成本，在这个基础上形成广告分成的收益。
当然2026年，平台政策已经出现微妙转向。抖音集团拿出超15亿元真人短剧保底扶持预算，将真人付费内容的自然流量分成比例从70%提升至80%；而纯AI短剧的分成系数被下调至40%。红果短剧也在10月取消了系列剧规模系数，不再鼓励“靠续作刷量换补贴”的作坊逻辑。
中腰部的AI短剧现在已经感受到了寒意，因为创作门槛低，大量的内容之间本身就需要竞争，很多内容已经无法自带流量，要想成为爆款就需要投流，才能破层级，否则的话根本就没有刷到就很难形成爆款。
“如果一部剧，赚不到钱还要出钱的投流的话，我们就像在给平台打工。”锋哥说，“不，准确地说，是在给平台的算法打工。”当然AIGC费用本身是成本，锋哥甚至说更直白：“我们是在给显卡打工。”AI视频生成的算力成本仍在持续上涨。如果实在是赚的不多，大不了一个人干，实在不行的话，就直接转行去企业里面做短剧打工了！
所以，现在他们实际上还在跟时间赛跑！我希望他们的运气足够好，多出几个爆款！
以上！
（备注：上述接受采访的锋哥、阿松、乐乐应采访者要求均为化名。）
本文由 AI图鉴自动抓取并翻译，版权归原作者所有；如需查看原文请点下方链接。
Man, you're a good star.
At 12 p.m., you decided to finish this episode and go to sleep:
When the groom left his wedding to pick up the moonlight at the airport, the bride turned her head and asked the delivery boy who came to the leg to pick up the bride and to bring the fake groom directly to get a certificate. Who knows who's hiding his identity? It's more than 80 episodes, two years apart.
In another play, a girl learned from her elementary school sister, but the whole family loved her, mocked her, didn't think that her sister had actually passed 708, whispered to the National Defense College, and in the scorn of the whole family, the girl's boyfriend was robbed by her sister...
It was not enough for a man who was kind enough to go up the mountain and save a White Dragon, who, in return, gave the young man a piece of jade stone and told him to buy the mountain which had been emptied out of the distance. The young man had replaced the house with 500 pieces of silver. He had also bought a mountain, signed a title to land, and opened up his life as an enemy.
......
It's 2 p.m.
You know the story, you know it's time to sleep, and your finger slips uncontrollably into the next episode, each with eight seconds of advertising.
The short play is really quite different now.
From being in love with me, to being chosen by the rich, to being the master of the mysterious characters who rocked the country, to being a son-in-law, who was despised, and a general template, gradually began to draw a fine line of people, with stories about different characters, mostly because the protagonists had been bullied, pressured, frustrated, unjust, discriminated against, then struck back, hid their identity, and finally became blind to all the things that looked down on them.
The audience attracted by these short dramas is not entirely critical — because the crowd is huge.
According to data published by the publish National Office of Radio and Television on 17 September: in the first eight months of 2026, there were 430,000 micro-fellows, 13 times more than in the entire year of last year, of which more than 90 per cent were in AI. The country has 851 million users of micro-short dramas, representing 66.7 per cent of the total number of Internet users. In 2025, the mini-shortshow market was officially over $100 billion in size.
This spring festival, from the earliest years until the beginning of the seventh month, has brought the red fruit drama App to 600 million viewers and contributed 19.3 billion viewers - in contrast to 187 million film festival viewers nationwide during the same period. The daily life of the red fruit drama has climbed to 168 million, an increase of 107 per cent over the same period, with one-day stays of 125 minutes per capita.
As a result, the short play is already national in its content, used by young people to commute, by middle-aged people to defunct classes and by elders to fill the post-retirement afternoon.
This is an explosion after the Ai short play has become a regular victory over the entire real-life short-time industry chain; the other end of the Ai short-time scene and the soul of the short-time story is a group of living people who produce addictive content and who are themselves trapped in the industry vortex.
During this period, WeChat Official Account (Specific Assemble) met with friends who were doing the AI short play, visited teams of different sizes in the field to do the AI short play, and I found that AI did look down at the threshold of doing the short play and fundamentally upgraded or reshaped the entire industrial chain.
I. Tsai's explosive training course: every episode of "emotional electroshock"
I'm a little boss of the hot Ai short play now, and at the beginning he thought I was on the side, and I said, I wanted to know the magic of the business because my parents were obsessed with it, but I'm not too sick of it myself.
Tsing saw me talk and we had the same grade, he was a former TV editor, then a short video, and now he's starting his business in the Ai shorts and he's got the results, and he shows me his book, one of which I shared at the beginning of the article. So he invited me to listen to some of his new staff trainings, and by the way, he gave me an interview, which saves time because he's really busy right now.
As I had agreed to go to his company in the writing building at Hanchongwu Square, after saying hello, I sat in the corner to listen to his training, and only saw him drawing a secret flow chart on the whiteboard, entitled “The script split”.
He was wearing a white duck cap, but his tone was not negotiable: “Remember, the short play is different from a TV show or a film and tells a story that is too long, the audience chooses us for less than a minute, and what I do is manage the dopamine.”
He knocked on the board with a mark pen, “Episode 80, 90 seconds each, for 120 minutes. All you have to do is cut that 120 minutes into 80 "emotional electrical current points."
He rubbed the schematics on the whiteboard and drew an up and down wave line, marking every key node:
Episode 1 (three seconds of gold): Opening the screens is slammed, violent clashes — public remorse for marriage, humiliation, terminal diagnosis, rape scenes, visual insight, etc. In the absence of a "suspension hook + emotional flashpoint" in the first seven seconds, the user retention rate fell directly to 41 per cent, and in this case the success was lost!
Episode 3-5: The first reverse - to allow the user to follow the lead person's own heart, choose to awaken, or the female owner's identity is revealed, a person suddenly appears, or is framed, so that the user can enter the storyline.
Episode 10: The first small climax — the first time the villains were hit in the face — immediately buried a new and greater crisis.
Episode 20-30: The mid-term misunderstanding — misunderstanding, separation, pressure, third-party intervention, the addition of variables — continues to create a “suffocation” that minimizes the mood of the audience.
Episode 50: The moment when the truth is about to be revealed, the reverse angle begins to be punished, but the exact punishment is left to the main actor, and the hardest to resist is the “half already known” state.
Episode 75-79: The mat before the ultimate reversal, each of which ends at the threshold of “just pushing the door” and “just saying the word”.
Episode 80: The great end has landed, but an open tail must be left to pave the way for the second season.
At the end of each episode, he said, “The audience must be given a form of physical discomfort — like sneezing until half of it is covered. They have to light the next episode to "find this sneeze."
The students asked, "What if the audience sees that they don't want to see the exit or not?" He smiled, "So we have a hard-on to get a little more density." - Every 15 seconds there must be an emotional peak, and each episode must have a reverse. This rhythm is accurate enough to trigger brain sensory mechanisms, with 30 minutes of continuous observation, and dopamine levels are 47 per cent higher than a normal film. You're not fighting the audience's willpower, you're actually working with their nerve circuit."
Someone whispered, "It doesn't sound like creation. It's more like neuroengineering. Tsing shot the board: "Emonomics, to be precise. It's the standard answer for the industry. You can disagree, but data doesn't lie."
He went on to say, “We have to do this every day in a short play, and especially in a short play that you think is particularly wonderful, and then think about how you'd write this script. In order to understand the industry, we'd put the short screen on the market directly in a shared network of companies, then take it all down, read and analyse it word for word. When we've got a lot of similar scripts, we can find the pattern."
Tsing concluded by saying that the short play was more fun than the TV movie, and stressed that we had a good time, and now it's a good time to learn this, and find any job after going out! That's what really ordinary people change their lives in this time! Speaking of which, six or seven of the participants gave an exciting round of applause!
I turned around with him in the office, about 40 flat offices, which are desktop computers, which are simpler than the live-time team, and are actually mainly in the AI Content Industry, where he said that short play was at the core of the story selection and wanted to work with me on the finished script. I said I can't feel it. He said he'd do it!
Assoun: from “writing scripts” to “building blocks” Division
At 28 years of age, he graduated from the Chinese language department and had wanted to be a teacher. Unfortunately, he had spent a few years in remote rural schools, paid too low a price and had not married, and had been able to change his profession.
Last year, the editor of Yangtze, who did not produce it, was allowed to jump into the Ai short play. I heard that I met other editors in Yangjiang and made a book public until I was interested in the industry, so I was taken more seriously. I asked him to go to Starbucks downstairs for coffee and then talked about his work.
I came up to ask him about his income. I am surprised that Song's minimum salary is not high, at only 8,000 a month, and needs to be set at an extra $10 per set of 100,000 for each show on the line, and an additional $500 for the creative incentive prize if it's played in one piece. I'm just staring at you. Then the short play was so cheap!
Last month, a “rebirth book” that he changed with his own hands turned into a small drop, with a minimum salary of 12,000 plus a bonus, which was the highest-paid month since his entry into the profession and a whole week of joy.
But then he went back into the next "Skin-Skin" play, and he told me, "The money is luck, the water line is the job."
This is understandable, because he was not a writer, even though he had never been in the film industry, and his knowledge of content production depended solely on the flow of his online novels or on their availability. However, he was particularly short of money and vowed to prove himself if he wanted to save money to get married earlier.
Every day on duty, basically, writing an AI short play with deepseek and Doubao, the key words entered were essentially related to the one he had recently pursued, refining the key words, and he changed his name, place, identity, time background, pressure points, pitfalls, abuse-to-abuse objects, asking AI how to set up more good points and reverse circuits.
Ten minutes later, 10,000 words of the first script appeared on the screen. Apparently, he has completely forgotten his dream of being a writer after graduation from the Chinese language, and he says, "The people who go to the Ai short play have no dreams, only thirst for traffic!"
The rest of his work is to “cut” the first draft of AI within the week to the 80 set of hooks, which means that at least 20 sets of scripts have to be completed every day, which is already the limit to working with AI, and the national AZLLM is basically paid members. It's due Friday. This is called "module assembly":
Module A: Stifling (stigmatized, misunderstood, abandoned)
Module B: Reverse (identity, ability to awaken, VIP appearance)
Module C: Face-to-face (rebels kneeling, shocked, former regretrs)
Module D: New suspenses (greater secrets, more dangerous enemies)
"Today, replace the "first rich daughter" with "the god of war," and tomorrow, replace the "mother-in-law" with the "dangerous girl." "This is a costume, and you can understand it as a skin change. Users don't care about skin, they care whether the fun is on time."
The fact that Song is producing four scripts a month, but he is already slow, because the team comes out for one month, which means that his income is still low, and if he increases his workload by creating three storylines and allowing different LLMs to run, then pick up hooks and dots, which means that the number of scripts delivered in a month is more than three, and if the copying is too harsh, it will certainly not be possible to waste the company ' s post-production input. How to balance quality and quantity. He said he'd have to practice more food now!
I asked him if he wanted to do something highly literary, and he said, "That's what you don't know about the industry." Shortplays are like chickens, faster than Kentucky standardization, which you call a phoenix-rearing model." He added:
"To make an Ai play, it takes a lot of effort to sharpen it, and it costs a lot of effort to create it, and it costs a lot of money to make post-production, whether it's an art design or animated, to consume token and to calculate it is more than a dozen times as much as our ordinary highs. More crucially, no one can guarantee traffic, time is running low, and everyone's moving fast. Otherwise, they'll be dumped all the way by their peers."
III. Happy: six faces, 2,000 plays, 5,000 a month
Happy, doing a clip in an Ai shorts studio at Hanyang-wen Founding Park, college degree, $5,000 a month. There's three of them, the owner of the shop, who runs a very low-cost route. As a career after 05, he did not have much to plan, and the low salary did not matter whether he graduated or was just close to home, but what he did not realize was that a teacher had taken him before and unfortunately had resigned because the salary was too low, which made Happy less money for a month now and required frequent overtime. After four months of devilish training, he has become an experienced short play editor.
Rather than editing, AIGC works, the main tool for editing is CapCut. The asset left by the former master is basically on the computer, and he cuts the same “old actor” — the kind of first-generation face of every short-time street, which corresponds to the six classics of Hegting, War God, White Flowers, Evil Woman, Sweets, Tzu Ma.
These six faces are “living” every day in different scripts, and on Monday, the scum man, on Tuesday, the lover, and on Wednesday, the elders. "These faces, cumulatively, have performed over 2,000 short plays."
Now production is done from a cost-control perspective, so they do not use high-precision models, do not customize face-to-face, and are cycling on six fixed-faced faces. The scene asset is all from public asset, an 80-episode play, with the power cost being kept within $5,000; the main cost is token, the cost of top up in each LLM.
The music job is to feed the final script to the Jimeng AI Survival Animation, word for word, and then to cut it with CapCut, and then send it directly to the script as soon as it's finished, confirming that there's no problem and sending it directly.
“Sometimes it was discovered that AI was not able to distinguish between the face and the face, some of the images were wrong, some emotions were wrong, and sometimes it was possible for AI to cry, and then no one really cared.”
I asked Lotte. Don't you think it's a little hasty? He said, "Twenty times a day, you can see your face, and now the boss wants efficiency, and it's hard to get fine," and, "Since the boss pays only 5,000 monthly wages, he doesn't pay much, or he has to pay for it!"
IV. How does the short play make money?
Of course, the platform can make money. With the attention, the advertisers can make money. Strictly speaking, short play practitioners are platform workers.
And when I looked around, I found out that the Ai shorts were actually eating the flow dividends of the real shorts industry.
The fact that the reality short show has explored the audience, the script set, the flow code, the flow platform, but at too high a cost, the reality short play, the actor's wages, make-up, lights, post-production production, the site cost, the copyright of the script, the cost of a collection is 100,000, while the Ai short play is strict enough to be done with a file and a clip, and some people can handle it with the help of LLM Ztoke, and the cost is reduced directly by a set of £10,000 to £10 to 100 times, resulting in the survival of only the first human shorts that have really gone through the business model.
The greatest advantage of AI shorts over reality shorts is free of charge, and the best shorts are now actually close to film-level.
The main revenue of the AI short play is in fact maintained by the Platform ' s traffic segment, with a high distribution of a relatively high volume of advertising per 1,000 people, so that the costs of short-time inputs can be fully covered and the proceeds of the advertising split formed on this basis.
Of course, in 2026, there was a delicate shift in platform policy. The Douyin group has a budget of over $1.5 billion for the support of real-life shortshows, increasing the proportion of natural flows of real-life paid content from 70 per cent to 80 per cent, while the coefficient for pure AI shorts has been lowered to 40 per cent. In October, the red fruit drama also eliminated the scale coefficient for series dramas and stopped encouraging the workshop logic of “renewed brush swaps”.
The Ai shorts in the center waist are now feeling chilled, because the creation threshold is low, much of the content itself needs to be competitive, much of it is no longer self-portable, and to become a bomb would require investment to break the hierarchy, otherwise it would be difficult to create a bomb without it.
“If a play doesn't make enough money to invest, it's like working for a platform.” He said, “No, to be precise, works for the platform algorithm.” Of course, the cost of AIGC is a cost in itself, and Brother Bed is even more straightforward: “We are working for GPU.” The calculator cost of AI video generation continues to rise. If you really don't make enough money, you can't do it alone.
So now they're actually racing with time! I hope they're lucky enough to give you extra money!
Over!
(Note: All of the above-mentioned interviewees are aliasssed, assoun and Happy Interviewers.
Auto-fetched and translated by AI Atlas. All rights belong to the original author.