(Yicai) April 2 -- China Central Television has broadcast the country's first mini-drama created entirely using artificial intelligence technology, just over a month after the debut of OpenAI's text-to-video AI generator Sora.

All aspects of the production, including art design, storyboarding, video production, voice acting, and musical score composition for Chinese Mythology was made by AI. The six-episode mini-drama was jointly developed by two units of CCTV and Tsinghua University's metaverse cultural lab.

“We’ve kept close contact with CCTV for a long time,” Shen Yang, a professor at Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication that took part in producing the micro-drama, told Yicai recently. “Both sides have been talking since last year about making the mini-drama.” 

While developing Chinese Mythology, the project team consistently prompted the AI to associate with the past, present, and future, Shen noted. After completing the tasks, it generated lots of reasonable content, he added.

Using AI also cut the production cost of the mini-drama, industry insiders said to Yicai. If it was made using traditional filming, editing, and musical score writing methods, the cost would have been seven times higher, they noted.

“Virtual production and technologies like AI-generated content have significantly reduced the investment cost of mini-dramas and improved production efficiency,” Liu Deliang, head of research institute Neowit, told Yicai.

Though using AI in short films has become widespread, human aesthetics will remain a crucial factor in determining whether the content generated by large language models is ultimately adopted, Zhang Hongzhong, dean of the School of Journalism and Communication of the Beijing Normal University, said at the China Internet Audio and Video Convention recently.

This is where technology cannot replace humans, Zhang said.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev