If one were to name the breakout star of this summer, Fang Taoci, the protagonist of the AI short drama The Laid-Off Girl, would certainly be a top contender. Treating the release of its first season as her "debut," this small-town girl climbed from a leading role in an AI-produced series to the cover of COSMO CRUSH, the digital publication under Cosmopolitan China, in just over two months. Across the two seasons, Fang Taoci evolves from a small-town girl cut from the edge of a group photo to navigating the fashion industry's cutthroat ladder. Increasingly, audiences find it difficult to simply view her as an AI construct.

The production team runs a dedicated social account for Fang Taoci, consistently posting daily content like cooking sessions, workouts, flower shopping, and morning logs. In the comment sections, fans eagerly await updates, discuss her relationships and career, and even suggest variety show appearances or concerts for her. A generated character has begun to offer a sense of companionship and continuous connection that resembles a real celebrity. Fang Taoci is not an isolated case. In the past six months, more than 20 AI-native series on Douyin have surpassed 100 million views each.

On September 21st, the first Douyin AI Creation Competition concluded. Over 72 days, 170,000 AI-generated works flooded the platform, amassing over 40 billion views. Douyin has consolidated those scattered creative impulses into a recognized content category. That same day, Douyin announced a partnership with iQIYI, committing over a hundred million yuan in resources to extend high-quality short stories on the platform into series and film formats. The goalposts have shifted from generating a single viral hit to creating a story with staying power, revealing an evolved ambition for AIGC on the platform.

New Forces in AIGC

While AI video generation has demonstrably improved this year, the real change on Douyin is how AI is being used for storytelling. At the start of the year, the focus was on visual styles like Eastern aesthetics and retro imagery. After model capabilities were enhanced in February, remixing popular memes surged in popularity. By March, realistic short films centered on family bonds, companionship, and real-world emotions broke through. From May onward, a growing number of creators began building original worldviews, shifting content from single pieces to serialized narratives.

After initial successes in monster containment, Eastern fantasy, and original sci-fi, sub-genres like female-centric stories, urban legends, and Chinese-style horror have cultivated stable audiences on Douyin. The focus of many works is moving from "displaying visuals" to "foregrounding the story," with creators transitioning from finishing a single video to continuously developing a narrative. This shift is driven by the confluence of two forces. On one hand, generative technology continues to lower the barriers to visual production. Subjects like sci-fi and costume dramas, which once heavily relied on actors, sets, and post-production, can now be tackled by individuals or small teams.

On the other hand, Douyin is actively organizing this new wave of supply. In September 2025, the platform launched the "AI Creation Wave Plan," offering support in traffic, tools, and courses. Within nearly a year, over 1.6 million creators have participated, with related content accumulating a staggering 140 billion views. The first AI Creation Competition, initiated this June, pushed evaluation criteria beyond mere "generation capability" to include scriptwriting, character development, narrative, and IP potential, actively seeking storytellers who can sustain a narrative over time. The pool of participants is diverse, including film students, novelists, visual designers, professional illustrators, overseas-returned directors, and veteran animators in their sixties, all competing alongside professional production teams.

The gold prize winner, He Long, was created by 2XLabs. This team, deeply entrenched in the film and television industry for over a decade, compressed the entire process from concept to finished film into six weeks this time: over a month was spent refining the script, while AI production itself took only about a week. To establish the world's sense of alienation, especially in the opening scene where the protagonist fishes on a wooden bridge, the team used AI to rapidly test over a hundred variations, including dawn, sunset, dusk, and overcast conditions. The trial-and-error process that traditionally required coordinating locations, lighting, and schedules was effectively shifted into the generation phase.

New creators are also entering the field. Director Li Rang, without a formal film studies background, self-taught AIGC video creation. His April release, Farewell, used a first-person perspective to trace a person's multiple partings from childhood to old age: leaving his mother, friends, lovers, and finally confronting aging. The work relied not on visual spectacle but on resonating with shared life experiences, surpassing 100 million views within five days of release. Xuan Jiu, a former game art and 3D designer, independently produced the post-apocalyptic sci-fi series Gui Xu, handling writing, character design, generation, editing, and scoring almost entirely alone. Fei Feifei, who spent nearly a decade creating live-action short films, has used AI to shed the constraints of actors, costumes, and sets, allowing her to continuously update The Laid-Off Girl.

Professional film teams have gained faster prototyping tools, established short-video creators have broken free from live-action production limits, and individual creators from art and literary backgrounds are now producing complete visual narratives on their own. AIGC hasn't erased professional skill; rather, it's dismantling the traditional notion that visual production requires immense capital. For Douyin, the more significant development isn't just an increase in AI video quantity, but the formation of a cohort of native creators capable of consistently producing characters, stories, and worldviews. AI content, previously dominated by one-off viral shorts, now possesses the potential for continuous, long-term growth.

Building an IP Reservoir

Douyin's deliberate and sustained efforts to cultivate the AIGC track clearly serve a purpose beyond simply adding another content category. Historically, Douyin has excelled at "making stars." Algorithms connect creators with interested audiences, and a follow turns a passerby into a fan. Influencers and personal brands became the platform's most critical content assets. However, internet celebrities have a known flaw: they rise quickly and fade just as fast. A viral hit's lifespan can be just a few days, forcing influencers to constantly produce new content to remain relevant to the algorithm.

The AIGC serialized stories now emerging on the platform represent a different type of production. Audiences of The Laid-Off Girl wait to see what happens next to Fang Taoci, while viewers of Gui Xu are invested in how its apocalyptic world unfolds. Users are no longer just following creators; they are following characters, stories, and a continuously expanding universe. Distinct from the personal IP built around the creator themselves, the prototypes of content IPs—featuring stable characters, storylines, and worldviews—are starting to appear. Chen Hongjia, Senior Vice President at iQIYI, shared at the event that a strong IP comprises two elements: "tangible assets" like recognizable characters, symbols, and settings, and "intangible assets" such as emotions, values, and worldview. Ultimately, it must be adaptable across various forms to generate sustained commercial value.

Simply put, for a story to truly become an IP, it must withstand repeated and varied use. Whoever can identify the best stories first gains the starting advantage in the entire downstream development chain. Traditionally, film and television IPs have predominantly originated from web novels and comics. The underlying reason is straightforward: writing is the cheapest medium. One person with a computer can begin, and there are far more people who can write than those who can direct a film. Producing a show is an entirely different beast. Raising a crew, securing actors, building sets, and completing post-production can consume tens of millions of dollars over several months, with a wrong bet resulting in real losses. No one wants to gamble on a blank script, so they only bet on stories that have already proven popular online.

Douyin has historically sat at the very end of this chain. Only after a show was filmed and scheduled would Douyin get involved, cutting trailers, buying trending topics, and mobilizing creators for remixes—essentially handling all promotional duties. AIGC is dramatically lowering this barrier. The most expensive genres, like sci-fi and costume drama, can now be prototyped as short films by individual creators using AI, and launched directly in front of hundreds of millions of users to gauge interest. Whether a story is compelling is answered by user clicks and comments. If Douyin can provide the answer to whether a story is worth further development, the platform transforms from a "post-event promoter" to a "pre-event filter."

On the day the competition concluded, Douyin announced its deep partnership with iQIYI. Both entities will invest resources exceeding a hundred million yuan to jointly promote the extension of high-quality short stories into longer formats like series and films. To help more good stories crystallize into IPs, Douyin also pledged 2 billion yuan in traffic support going forward, alongside increased creation funds, advertising monetization, and paid content options. It also plans collaborations with film festivals and studios to shepherd mature stories into other media. An IP nurtured on Douyin isn't necessarily limited to the "short film to long series" pathway. Douyin revealed that Zombie Cleaner has already begun its adaptation for film or television, while popular titles like File 8 and Gui Xu are experimenting with interactive drama formats. Mini-games like File 8: Arrival and Gui Xu: Labyrinth are also in development. A short video appearing on Douyin today could conceivably grow into a series, a feature film, or a video game in the future. What Douyin aims to capture isn't necessarily every stage of IP development, but rather the critical position where good stories are first discovered and validated.