Generative video is past the stage where the interesting question is whether it looks real. The interesting question is whether it is cheaper than the alternative — and in Chinese commercial production, in 2026, it usually is.
Key takeaways
- Marketing: by March 2026, AIGC-generated short-video marketing material accounted for about 10% of total spend in Kuaishou's short-video marketing marketplace.
- Professional output: Kling added native 4K generation in April 2026 — described as an industry first — targeting film, advertising and other professional users who previously needed expensive post-production for resolution.
- Consumer products at scale: Kuaishou users sent 1.1 million customisable AI effect gifts in Q1 2026, with Kling's generation capability feeding live-streaming gift production.
- Engagement: during the 2026 Spring Festival period, Kuaishou reported total live-stream views above 15 billion and total short-video plays above 250 billion.
- Cultural tourism: AI guides and immersive installations have moved into major heritage sites, including an "AI guide Wang Bo" at Nanchang's Tengwang Pavilion that explains nearby sights based on a visitor's real-time position.
Why advertising moved first
Advertising absorbed generative video before film did, for a simple economic reason: the volume is enormous, the unit value is low, and the creative half-life is measured in days.
A campaign that needs forty variants across formats and languages could not previously afford production for all forty. It produced three and recycled them. When generation costs approach zero, the constraint disappears — and the 10% share of marketing spend reported by March 2026 is what that transition looks like in a ledger.
This is the least visible and most economically significant use of generative media. It does not produce anything anyone watches voluntarily. It produces the ordinary commercial video that every business needs and most could not previously justify making.
Film and television: resolution was the gate
Professional production held out longer, and resolution was the reason. A generated clip that looks acceptable at 720p is unusable on a cinema screen or a broadcast schedule.
Native 4K output, launched in April 2026, removed that specific barrier. Combined with director-mode controls — multi-shot generation, per-scene prompts, character consistency — the technology moved from "generate a clip" toward "shoot a sequence."
The honest assessment from analysts is that this is an industrial tool, not a replacement for filmmaking. Kuaishou's own framing is "cinema-grade texture," which is a claim about output quality, not authorship.
The part nobody outside China is watching: microdrama
Short-form episodic drama — microdrama (短剧) — is a genuinely Chinese format, and it is the first narrative medium designed from the ground up around mobile, vertical, thirty-second-per-episode consumption.
It is also a format that consumes enormous volumes of content, which makes it a natural fit for generative production: AI-assisted script generation, AI-generated animation (漫剧), and AI-assisted dubbing are already standard practice in the sector. Platform incentive programmes now treat AI-generated and human-produced drama as parallel categories competing for the same distribution.
This matters globally because microdrama is exporting. If a format invented in China becomes a global mobile format, the production tooling built for it will too.
Cultural heritage and tourism
The most charming applications are in tourism, where generative AI solves a specific problem: heritage sites have fixed content and diverse visitors.
At Tengwang Pavilion in Nanchang, an AI "guide" modelled on the Tang poet Wang Bo explains nearby features based on where a visitor is standing, and can act as an examiner — scoring visitors who recite the famous Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion. In Xi'an, the "Chang'an Twelve Hours" themed district uses holographic projection, AI interaction and role play to recreate Tang street life, including robots that brew tea and exchange poetry.
These are small things. They are also precisely the kind of deployment that makes a technology feel normal to a population rather than novel.
The unresolved question
Intellectual property remains genuinely unsettled. The speed of capability has outrun the licensing frameworks for training data and style, and rights holders in every market are contesting it.
What is notable in the Chinese case is that the largest platforms are building commercial products with enterprise customers and audited revenue — a structure in which IP disputes have to be resolved rather than ignored, because the counterparties are businesses with reputations to protect.
Sources: Kuaishou 2026 quarterly reporting and product announcements; Cyberspace Administration of China reporting on AI in cultural tourism, 2026.