On Monday morning in Beijing, the CEO of China's biggest streaming service walked onto a stage and announced that he was going to let machines make the shows.

Gong Yu called it the third stage of iQiyi's evolution. He called it the AIGC Ecosystem. What he actually described was a plan to gut a 16-year-old company and rebuild it as a platform where algorithms generate the content and humans scroll past it.

This is the biggest corporate overhaul in iQiyi's history. The company is turning its Netflix-style video app into something closer to TikTok, except the videos won't be made by people. They'll be generated by Nadou Pro, an AI agent iQiyi launched on March 30 that handles scriptwriting, storyboarding, art direction, visual effects, and final rendering. End-to-end. Prompt goes in, movie comes out.

The Stack Behind It

Nadou Pro runs on iQiyi's proprietary QiZhi multimodal models plus five third-party systems: SeeDance, Kling, Vidu, Hailuo, and WAN. It advertises a feature called "blockbuster prompts" that translates abstract creative ideas into production-ready cinematic direction. That phrase alone should make every working screenwriter in Beverly Hills reach for a drink.

The company has 400 new titles slated for 2026. Gong said the moment AI disrupts both long-form and short-form content is imminent. He didn't say what happens to the people currently making long-form and short-form content. He didn't need to.

Across the industry, Tencent Video's boss has already predicted the first blockbuster AI drama will air in the second half of this year. Everyone in Chinese entertainment knows where this is headed. The only question is which studio goes first.

Why This Matters Beyond China

iQiyi is not a weird Chinese side-quest. It's a publicly traded company that reaches hundreds of millions of subscribers. When it switches to AI-generated content at industrial scale, it sets a precedent that Netflix, Disney, and every Western streamer will study very closely. The economics are impossible to ignore. A traditional Chinese drama episode costs roughly $200,000 to $500,000 to produce. An AI-generated one costs the electricity to run the model.

Hollywood spent two summers fighting this fight. Writers struck. Actors struck. They won contractual language about AI that the studios signed with their fingers crossed. iQiyi just announced that the fingers-crossed approach is over. They're going first, they're going loud, and they're doing it while the U.S. industry is still debating whether AI-generated dialogue counts as "writing" under union rules.

My Opinion

I'll be blunt. The iQiyi pivot is not an entertainment story. It's a labor story dressed up as a product launch.

The honest read here is that a public company just told its shareholders it plans to replace writers, storyboard artists, VFX houses, and whole production crews with software. The press release dresses it up in words like "ecosystem" and "community" and "the human core of creation." I don't buy it. When your new tool literally handles every aspect of filmmaking from script to final render, the human core of creation is the prompt writer. That's one person replacing a few hundred.

Here's what actually bugs me. The Western tech press keeps framing Chinese AI moves as cautionary tales or geopolitical flexes. This one isn't. It's a preview. The same math works in Los Angeles. The same tools exist. The same shareholders exist. And the same boards will ask the same question once iQiyi's AI-first shows start pulling viewers without bleeding cash on crews.

By the time the first Nadou Pro-made blockbuster drops later this year, the debate in American studios won't be whether AI can make a watchable show. iQiyi will have answered that one. The debate will be how fast the rest of the industry follows — and whether any union in 2026 is strong enough to slow it down. My bet? No.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark) / www.humai.blog / 20 Apr 2026