“While I was in LA, the news came out that in China, the majority of actors seemingly were being replaced with AI. … And now it's like you go on the Real Short app and it is like 90% AI-generated microdramas and people love them. They're watching them more than the human-centered stuff. … It has gone from, this is the savior of Hollywood, this is the future of entertainment, to man, I wish I could get a job with a microdrama set because that stuff is gone. And it's all about AI now.”

…of soft pornographic slop. But then as I was working on it, things took a turn, a pretty insane turn. You know, I had always suspected while I was on these sets that this stuff was going to be used to train AI. I mean, the microdramas themselves, even the human-made ones, look like they are AI.

Right. You start reading. I mean, even when I started reading the piece, like a third of the way into it before you even got to this point, I was just like, why are they even bothering with humans knowing that text out there? And then I think you've like literally ended up writing that line.

Yeah. The question we had was about like who was working on these productions. And we mean that both in terms of the performers and the crew. Did it seem to be people who fell through the cracks of the traditional industry or like a whole new class of creative workers in the sense that like YouTube…

I think in the case of the actors, there's a mix. I mean, some of the actors are people who never thought about acting before and who were, you know, recruited from their Instagram pages and they're just kind of models. A lot of them were people that are just sort of, you know, Hollywood has always…

So would you say it's more of like these tend to be functioning as like the current viable option or the practical option as opposed to like the stepping stone to Hollywood or to oh,