An emerging trend in the short drama industry sees AI scriptwriters being mandated to deliver a minimum of five scripts per day. Last autumn, 33-year-old Beibei resigned from an optoelectronics factory in Shenzhen and moved north to pursue a career in film and television. At the time, live-action short dramas were booming. Leveraging his training from a screenwriting program at the Beijing Film Academy, he quickly found employment as a scriptwriter at a company. However, with the explosive growth of AI-generated short dramas, his company abruptly pivoted to AI-driven content. Beibei was reassigned to write copy for "AI narration dramas," tasked with producing five scripts daily, each comprising twenty thousand words, in a highly formulaic assembly-line process. The content is described as monotonous and repetitive, revolving around clichéd themes of revenge and retribution. Approval processes are lenient, with scripts rarely being rejected, placing extreme emphasis on quantity over quality. As AI technology gradually dismantles the professional barriers of content creation, many production companies treat AI as the ultimate standard. In reality, practitioners across the industry chain face an intensifying dilemma of "working for AI," leading to an increasingly competitive and demanding environment. Some observers argue that AI short drama production has evolved into a labor-intensive sector. Downstream in the AI short drama supply chain, a large number of part-time "card selectors," animators, and small production teams grapple with surging workloads and cut-throat price competition. Numerous short drama and comic drama companies, along with some former long-form drama and variety show producers, shifted to the AI simulation track in the first quarter of this year, initiating layoffs, new hires, and retraining programs. Beibei's experience exemplifies this industry shift. Notably, the business model of AI short dramas heavily relies on platform subsidies. Leading short drama platform Hongguo eliminated minimum guarantee payments for small and medium-sized producers, causing script acceptance rates to plummet from approximately 30% to just 7.5%. This has exacerbated survival pressures for smaller companies that previously depended on volume-based approvals and guaranteed income. Liu Debin from the Beijing Film Academy's Literature Department summarized the situation, stating, "The AI short drama boom profited primarily from platform payouts. Now that platforms are cutting funding, these producers immediately face difficulties." Veteran film industry professional Wu Gang revealed that between October and December last year, platforms prioritized "volume-driven" logic, offering higher revenue shares to low-tech AI narration comics and slide-show-style animations. During that period, production required only a few animated graphics and basic card selection, with quantity trumping quality. Companies could hire interns or vocational school graduates at low monthly salaries, such as 2,000 yuan, for streamlined operations. He also noted that genuine film industry professionals were unwilling to participate under such conditions, as AI short drama production rates are typically only 600-800 yuan per minute, leaving minimal profit after accounting for computing costs. Consequently, production is often outsourced to subcontracting firms. In Liu Debin's view, the true value of AI lies in "de-industrializing" content creation, not in establishing more efficient assembly lines. "AI should liberate creators from the constraints of capital and technology, allowing them to refocus on storytelling, character development, and emotional depth. This could propel the film and television industry from a traditional model of 'high investment, long cycles, and low efficiency' towards a superior paradigm of 'low cost, short timelines, and high output,'" he argued. Liu added, "The real danger is not AI writing scripts, but humans using AI as a crutch and abandoning critical thinking. When producers define creativity as a 'fully automated assembly line,' it is not jobs that vanish, but the very essence of what makes drama meaningful." In other words, the issue is not AI itself, but the industry's choice to employ it in the laziest and most short-sighted manner: reducing creation to data labeling, turning screenwriters into prompt engineers, and transforming short dramas into disposable inputs for algorithmic distribution. Liu Debin believes that creative democratization should mean equal opportunity for expression, not the flattening of artistic capability. Lowering technical barriers does not eliminate aesthetic standards; true creative equity involves the liberation of expressive rights, not the homogenization of outcomes.