China is taking AI to the next level: One film – and at the touch of a button, a version for each country

The impact of artificial intelligence on the entertainment industry could be significantly greater than previously thought. It’s no longer just about translating voices, automatically generating subtitles, or digitally altering actors’ lip movements.

China is already working on the complete localization of films and mini-series using AI.

One example is Seko, an AI platform from the Chinese computer vision company SenseTime. At the beginning of September, the platform was expanded with a feature called “Overseas Re-Rendering”.

This principle could fundamentally modify international film production: instead of simply translating a Chinese film into German, English, or Spanish, AI can completely recreate the entire production for a different market.

People are really not paying enough attention to this.

Last week, in the post below, I wrote that China would soon have AI tools to easily internationalize the hundreds of thousands of AI mini-series it produces every year, and “re-render the footage with local faces, languages and other local cultural characteristics for every single international market at near-zero cost.”

Turns out I was already behind: these tools exist already.

The video below demos Seko, made by SenseTime (商汤, Shāngtāng), a Hong Kong-listed computer vision company. Seko is a platform for making AI-powered mini-series, and in early September it added a feature called 出海转绘 (chūhǎi zhuǎnhuì, “overseas re-rendering”).

The way it works is that you upload a finished episode, it breaks it down shot by shot (framing, camera movement, props, sound), you pick a target market and language, and it regenerates the whole thing with local characters, sets, props and even on-screen signs, keeping the same composition and pacing as the original. English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, French, German: one episode, as many versions as you want.

It’s basically as if Netflix could remake every single one of its series for every country on earth, with local actors and in local language, at the push of a button. It’s a massive change in the entertainment industry.

Which means we’re probably on the eve of an absolute avalanche of Chinese mini-series hitting every social feed on the planet, each one looking like it was shot down the street.

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 30, 2026

Same film – but suddenly with German actors

A completed episode is uploaded first. The AI then analyses scene by scene: image composition, camera movements, characters, props, sound, and other elements.

Next, the target market and language are selected.

The software then generates a new version with locally based actors, adapted locations, props, and even newly created signs and text within the image. The composition and rhythm of the original are preserved.

According to the report, languages supported include English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, French and German.

This is about much more than synchronization.

A Chinese drama could be re-rendered for Germany in such a way that it looks as if it were produced with German actors for a German audience. A Thai version would be created for Thailand, and a Japanese version for Japan – all from the same original production.

The Netflix principle on steroids

Imagine if Netflix could reshoot a finished series for any country in the world at the touch of a button. The story remains the same. Camera angles and editing remain the same. But the actors, language, setting, props, and dialogue are adapted to the respective market.

What previously required multiple film crews, actors, dubbing studios and enormous production budgets could now be largely automated.

And that is precisely where the explosive potential of this technology lies.

The costs for an international version could drop drastically. Instead of painstakingly adapting a Chinese production for foreign audiences, it could appear almost immediately as if it had been produced for their own cultural context.

China’s mini-series could suddenly be everywhere

This development is particularly significant due to the enormous Chinese market for so-called mini-dramas or micro-dramas. These are extremely short series episodes produced specifically for smartphones and virtual communication networks. China already possesses an industrial production structure capable of churning out such content at an enormous pace.

So far, cultural and linguistic distance has formed a natural barrier to international distribution.

AI could eliminate precisely this barrier.

A successful Chinese miniseries no longer needs to look like a Chinese production. The same story could be released simultaneously in dozens of countries – each with faces, language, and settings that seem familiar to the respective audience.

The viewer could consume a Chinese production without even realizing at first glance that the original originates from China.

The scale is already enormous: according to the Chinese media regulator NRTA, around 430,000 micro-dramas went online in the first eight months of 2026 alone, more than 90 percent of them produced using AI. Around 800 million people watch this format. AI also drastically reduces production costs: a single minute of film is said to cost as little as $140 in some cases. Hou Xiyou Ji, a 30-episode, entirely AI-generated series without human actors, even aired on Chinese television and garnered 150 million views in five days. China is thus building an entertainment industry that can produce content extremely cheaply and then localize it for international markets.

On this topic, I just stumbled upon an extraordinary number released by China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA): 430,000 micro-dramas (short TV series) went online in China in the first 8 months of 2026, and over 90% of them were AI-made (https://t.co/sZcxNq5RA6) 🤯

And micro-dramas aren’t a micro-phenomenon in China: still according to the NRTA, they’re watched by 800 million people – a good majority of the population –  and the market passed 100 billion yuan last year, about twice China’s cinema box office (https://t.co/Xo8QN9aWFg).

Which means that, that’s it, we’re there: the majority of new TV-style series in the world’s largest market are made by AI.

I knew anecdotally that AI entertainment content was big in China (hence my casual take last night 👇) but I’m genuinely awed by the scale and speed of it: AI dramas were virtually non-existent at the beginning of last year and, fast forward a year, it’s now human-made dramas that are the exception!

To be clear, this is about what gets made: many of these AI dramas are – like YouTube videos – made by everyday folks and don’t that much viewership. But that’s how every creator economy works: a long tail few people watch, and a handful of hits that reach hundreds of millions.

This might possibly become China’s answer to Hollywood. We’re talking immense production cost advantages: the cost per minute of footage for AI micro-dramas is roughly 1,000 yuan ($140, https://t.co/gElTrHJJ7Q) while your typical Netflix drama costs $5M to $10M per hour-long episode, so $85,000 to $170,000 a minute. In other words, it’s roughly a thousand times cheaper to produce.

And there are other advantages too: with AI, it’s ridiculously easy to re-render the footage with local faces, languages and other local cultural characteristics for every single international market at near-zero cost. Which would be something Hollywood never had: a culture-neutral fiction factory.

All the more because we’re also starting to see full-length AI dramas appear.

In fact, just 3 weeks ago, Hunan TV, one of China’s biggest channels, began airing in prime time “Hou Xiyou Ji” (“The Later Journey to the West”): a 30-episode series of 40 minutes each, entirely AI-generated, without a single human actor. You can watch the first episode here in full: https://t.co/DHsqIxsGX2 and see for yourself that it looks remarkably well made.

It went from approval to broadcast in just under 4 months and, according to the series’ director Li Dongshen, costs about 900,000 yuan per episode to make ($135,000), or 50 times less than your typical Netflix series (https://t.co/om4UQsE3HJ).

And it did very well: it topped its time slot among provincial satellite channels five nights running, passed 150 million plays on Mango TV in its first five days, and sent Mango Excellent Media’s stock up 44% in two days, adding over 11 billion yuan to its market value (https://t.co/JVvpGD0B9H).

Bear in mind that at the beginning of 2025 the technology could not do this at all (back then, no-one could produce more than a few seconds of coherent AI video, let alone a 40-minute episode with consistent characters) so it’s an understatement to say that things are moving fast. Imagine where this will be in another 18 months: today is the worst AI dramas will ever look.

Interestingly, this technology is overwhelmingly Chinese. Where China is roughly on par vs the West for frontier LLMs, it is clearly ahead in AI video: on the main blind-test leaderboards (https://t.co/Io4rdccaYZ), out of the 10 top spots, 9 are held by Chinese models (ByteDance’s Seedance, Alibaba’s Wan, https://t.co/QKbcemwQkO’s MAGI-2, Minimax), with Google the only Western lab still in the race.

And they’ve clearly unlocked some sort of flywheel which gives them a considerable advantage: the companies building the models are the same ones that own the platforms where the content gets watched.

ByteDance makes Seedance and owns Douyin and Hongguo, China’s biggest micro-drama app. Alibaba makes Wan and owns Youku. Kuaishou makes Kling and owns, well, Kuaishou. So hundreds of thousands of AI dramas get made with their models, then watched by 800 million people on their app. Better models make better dramas, better dramas bring more viewers and more creators, and round it goes.

No Western lab has anything like it: OpenAI had a model – Sora, being discontinued this very week (https://t.co/c1PeqrXRRz) – but no audience, and Netflix has an audience but no model.

Only Google has Youtube but, so far, it strangely doesn’t seem to have connected the pieces: it has the best video model in the West and the biggest video audience in the world, but no serialized drama format built on top. If anyone in the West can replicate the Chinese flywheel, it’s them. But for now, they haven’t.

In any case, long story short, what this all means is that the entertainment industry, in Hollywood and elsewhere, is on the cusp of being seriously disrupted, and its epicenter is China.

Humans won’t disappear from the process – even in China, the regulator’s line is that “AI is a tool, humans are the creators” (https://t.co/ewv3PuZ9uk) – but it matters a great deal which humans, and whose tools, and it looks increasingly like the next generation of storytellers will either be Chinese or using Chinese tools.

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) September 21, 2026

A new form of cultural globalization

This will not only change film production, but potentially also the global competition for attention. Until now, Hollywood, Netflix, European studios, and Korean producers have had to invest considerable sums to market content internationally and adapt it culturally.

If AI almost automates this localization, suddenly the person who can produce as many stories as quickly as possible will have a huge advantage.

China already possesses a huge domestic market, production capacities, and a rapidly growing AI industry.

Seko could therefore only be a taste of what’s to come.

Because once such systems function reliably, there is hardly any technical reason why a production should exist in only one language and with one cast.

The avalanche may only just be beginning.

The consequences could be enormous.

Instead of a few Chinese series that are successfully exported abroad, in the future thousands or even more automatically localized productions could simultaneously push onto international platforms and social networks.

And each one could look as if it had been produced specifically for the respective market.

This doesn’t just modify dubbing and film production. It changes the very idea of what constitutes a “foreign film”.

The next global media wave could therefore look completely different from anything before: content will be produced in China, culturally reworked by AI, and then broadcast worldwide – so locally that the viewer may not even notice its origin.

 

yogaesoteric
October 5, 2026