Snappixify
Yesterday, the Weibo topic "AI actors for roles below the second male lead" hit the top of the Weibo trending list.
On the same day, the well-known media company Youhug Media made a high-profile announcement regarding the signing of two AI digital artists, Qin Lingyue and Lin Xiyan, and simultaneously launched the first AI drama series "The Mystery of the Qinling Bronze".
Youhug Media announces the signing of AI actors, source: Weibo
Is AI really going to replace actors?
Impact
Actually, it has already begun.
The first layer of AI's impact is concentrated in the short drama track.
The core logic of the short drama industry is "low cost, high turnover, and traffic orientation," and AI perfectly matches this demand.
AI can quickly generate various templated characters. Whether it's a domineering CEO or an underdog making a comeback, AI can accurately replicate them, with expressions, dialogue, and movements that rival those of ordinary human actors.
Taking the smash hit "Zhanxian Platform Live-Action AI Version" from the end of last year as an example, it surpassed 100 million views within 6 days of its launch on Douyin.
Poster of the short drama "Zhanxian Platform Live-Action AI Version"
Many viewers followed the series for 20 episodes before realizing that the gentle and considerate second female lead in the drama was actually a string of code.
DataEye data shows that in the top 100 comic dramas in January 2026, the proportion of AI-simulated human short dramas has increased from 7% last year to 38%.
The AI-ification of short dramas has become a general trend.
The second layer of AI's impact has reached the long drama and theatrical movie track.
The Weibo trending topic "AI actors for roles below the second male lead" discusses exactly the impact of AI on actors in long dramas.
The core competitiveness of long dramas and theatrical movies is emotional resonance and character arcs, which determines that the core leading actors cannot be replaced by AI for the time being.
However, AI's replacement of extras and supporting roles has already begun.
In the past, a long costume drama or a war-themed theatrical movie often required hundreds or even thousands of extras to set up grand scenes such as royal court assemblies, battlefield slaughters, and bustling streets.
Now, AI can generate massive numbers of background characters in batches, precisely matching scene requirements.
In fact, AI's impact on the film and television industry goes far beyond the actor group. Multiple stages, such as post-production, stage design, and prop building, are all being reconstructed by AI.
In the field of post-production, the substitution effect of AI is the most obvious.
In this year's hit drama "The Year of Peace", the scene of crows eating minced meat that left a deep impression on the audience was generated by Kuaishou's Kling AI.
Scene of crows eating minced meat generated by Kling AI
If traditional CG methods were used, it would take five or six processes and several weeks. The crew used Kling AI, and one person efficiently completed it within a week.
Reconstruction
From actors to post-production, from stage design to props, why are production crews increasingly favoring AI?
First, the advantages of cost and efficiency.
The film and television industry is inherently a high-cost and high-risk industry. Expenses such as actors' remuneration, venue rentals, and post-production often account for over 80% of the project budget.
AI actors do not require remuneration, and AI post-production and AI stage design do not require a massive workforce, directly breaking this cost structure.
Public data shows that the cost of a top-tier premium live-action short drama is between 1.5 million and 3 million yuan, while the cost of a premium AI-simulated human short drama can be controlled within 200,000 yuan.
The efficiency is even more astonishing.
In terms of stage design and props, AI can automatically generate clothing patterns, prop blueprints, and scene concept art based on historical materials or script descriptions. It can generate a hundred design plans in just 1 hour, improving efficiency by 30 times compared to traditional hand-drawing.
Second, zero risk of celebrity scandals.
In recent years, incidents of celebrity scandals have occurred frequently. Behaviors such as drug use, tax evasion, and making controversial remarks often lead to the entire drama being taken offline or reshot, bringing hundreds of millions in losses to production companies.
In this year's Spring Festival blockbuster "Blades of the Guardians", a certain actress left the cast due to controversy. The crew had to bring in a new actress, Chen Lijun, for an emergency rescue, reshooting 32 high-risk scenes within 11 days, causing the production cost to surge by 150 million yuan.
A shot of actress Chen Lijun in "Blades of the Guardians"
AI actors completely avoid this risk.
They won't have scandals, won't act like divas, and won't suddenly go on strike. They are on call 24 hours a day, and their images, lines, and behaviors are completely controlled by the production company, making them the "perfectly compliant tool persons."
More importantly, the copyright of AI actors belongs to the production company, eliminating worries about portrait rights disputes, contract renewal premiums, and other issues.
So, are human actors going to face massive unemployment?
The answer to this must be found in the future landscape of the film and television industry.
In the future, film and television dramas will see a clear audience differentiation: some will prefer the high efficiency, convenience, and diverse themes of AI dramas, while others will hold on to the emotional warmth and acting texture of live-action dramas.
Some netizens explicitly oppose AI dramas, source: Weibo
The market pattern of parallel development in both tracks has brought new challenges and opportunities for human actors.
The challenge is that AI will replace a portion of human actors, mainly those practitioners who lack acting skills and only assume templated functions.
These standardizable positions with no emotional depth will highly likely be replaced by AI at a lower cost and higher efficiency.
The opportunity is that the audience's need for emotional resonance from human leading actors is something AI cannot replace.
Just as Feng Yuanzheng, member of the CPPCC National Committee and president of the Beijing People's Art Theatre, said during the national Two Sessions, the vividness and vitality of live-action performances cannot be copied by AI. The tears of AI are digitally produced, but the tears of human actors flow from their bodies; they have warmth and flavor, and can truly touch people's hearts.
Not only did AI not eliminate the acting profession, it instead forced human actors to return to their core values, making truly capable actors more competitive and more favored by the market.
More importantly, the popularization of AI has also spawned new professions.
AI actor operations, AI prompt tuners, virtual character designers, etc.—these positions will become new employment growth points in the industry.
AI's impact on the film and television industry is essentially an "efficiency revolution" and "value reconstruction," rather than a simple "unemployment crisis."
Circulation
The explosive growth of AI-generated media has also fueled a massive demand for content sharing and secondary creation. This is where utility platforms like the Snappixify online video downloader enter the picture.
As AI generates vast amounts of highly engaging, fragmented video content, viewers and creators alike need efficient ways to save, study, and remix these clips. Snappixify and similar online downloading tools allow users to quickly extract high-quality, watermark-free video materials from various social platforms.
For the ordinary viewer, it is a convenient way to save their favorite AI-generated scenes for offline viewing. For video creators, these downloaders provide an instant repository of AI visual assets for re-editing, prompt reverse-engineering, and commentary. By removing the friction of acquiring video files, tools like Snappixify essentially act as catalysts, accelerating the viral spread and democratization of AI-generated short dramas across the entire internet.
Changes
As early as 2023, about 11,500 film and television writers in Hollywood, USA, took to the streets of New York and Los Angeles to strike, calling for higher wages, demanding fair contracts, and refusing to work for AI.
Hollywood Writers Strike
This struggle, under the banner of "refusing to work for AI," did not stop the rolling torrent of technology.
In three years, AI has evolved from text-assisted creation all the way to independently completing the full-process generation of audiovisual content.
Particularly earlier this year, ByteDance officially launched a new generation video generation model, Seedance 2.0, which can automatically plan storyboards, camera movements, and transitions based solely on text prompts, completing entire video creations with coherent characters and synchronized lip movements.
This means that the barriers from script conception to final film output have been completely broken. Work that previously required months of collaboration among writers, directors, camera operators, and post-production teams can now be quickly implemented by individual creators using AI.
Living in this era of rapid change, instead of getting bogged down in the anxiety of being replaced by AI, it is better to proactively embrace the changes and find your own positioning.
This principle applies not only to actors but to every single one of us.
