Chinese Netflix Competitor Opens Floodgates to AI Slop
It may be the beginning of the end for the global legions of C-drama fans.
iQIYI, the Chinese streaming service known for its massive library of Asian films and TV shows, is anticipating that AI will create the majority of its content in just five years, Bloomberg reports.
In an interview at iQIYI’s annual content showcase, CEO Gong Yu presented a sweeping AI vision so divorced from the company’s roots as a Netflix-style service that it has shades of Mark Zuckerberg’s aborted pivot to building an entire “Metaverse.” Per Bloomberg‘s paraphrasing of Yu’s remarks, the Beijing-based streamer plans to convert its website and video app into a “social media destination that hosts mainly AI-generated content” — content it hopes will be made using its own model.
On Monday, the service launched its Nadou Pro suite, an all-in-one AI toolkit designed to handle every aspect of filmmaking, from screenwriting to storyboards and video generation. The company says Nadou Pro has already been used to make films during internal testing, but that’s not the extent of its vision. iQIYI is also planning to release an AI-generated film this summer, one it hopes will be a genuine box office success rather than an overlooked experiment.
A version of the facelifted iQIYI app was unveiled on Monday. Striking when the iron is hot, executives hope to capture the mass appeal of OpenAI’s video generator app Sora, which unexpectedly shut down last month.
“It’s once in a decade,” Gong said of the opportunity to an audience of producers and directors at the content showcase, per Bloomberg. “We have to take the tide as it comes.”
In the meantime, iQIYI will release 16 Nadou-produced films on the platform — the opening salvo before its anticipated onslaught of AI content. iIQIYI will even pay filmmakers that use its AI tool an additional 20 percent cut of advertising and membership fees, Gong said.
iQIYI’s expansive AI vision comes amid a swell of unrest in Hollywood over how the tech could disrupt the industry, sparked by the impressive capabilities of the latest video generating models like Google’s Veo 3 and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. Some insiders say AI is already pervasive in the industry and others fatalistically claim that an AI takeover is inevitable, though many examples of movie-like AI footage have turned out to be misleadingly presented. There’re also nagging questions about the economic feasibility of AI video generation. Sora, OpenAI’s app that iQIYI is hoping to eat the lunch of, was reportedly losing over $1 million per day before being shut down.
It also comes during a less-than-outstanding year at the Chinese box office, with the runaway success of “Ne Zha 2,” which released on the first day of the Chinese New Year holiday in 2025, proving a tough act to follow. Domestic sales during this year’s Chinese New Year week plunged by nearly 40 percent, with one report suggesting it was the lowest figure since 2018. iQiyi’s own revenue is estimated to have fallen by 13 percent in the first quarter of this year, Bloomberg reported.
