New Chinese online cultural products, particularly online literature, film, short videos, and video games, are generating new waves of followers worldwide, thanks to the powerful support of digital and AI technologies.
As digital technologies proliferate, Chinese cultural works have adopted new modes of expression and media, thereby expanding their reach to a broader global audience.
At the digital virtual studio of the Hujing Digital Media and Entertainment Group in Beijing, advanced virtual shooting technology and a giant LED screen enable the switching of digital shooting scenes for online films within minutes.
It used to take us a whole day to adjust the light for this filming scene, now the work can be done in five seconds with the help of AI-controlled digital lighting arrays and AI algorithms, achieving an efficiency that is about 500 times that of the industry average," said Liu Chongya, digital production director of the company.
Liu said that digital technology has reduced costs and increased efficiency for the production of online films. More importantly, it has become a "powerful tool" to connect audiences at home and abroad.
"Taking ‘The Early Spring’ as an example, we considered the overseas market when we were preparing for the film. We specially recreated a famous harbor in Phuket, Thailand in the virtual shooting scene, just to make Thai audiences feel a sense of familiarity, which is a more effective way to polish our works," Liu said.
AI technology has also greatly facilitated the translation of online literature, enabling Chinese stories to be read globally with a single click. At China Literature Limited Group, a Shanghai-based online literature company, the team has been working on intelligent translations in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, and French. This year, it also completed translations in Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Turkish.
On our overseas reading platform, WebNovel, there are already over 10,000 translated Chinese works. Among them, 7,200 works were translated using artificial intelligence technology. This has not only allowed us to achieve a breakthrough in quantity but has also won the recognition of overseas readers for the quality,” said Hou Xiaonan, CEO and President of China Literature Limited Group.
AI is also playing a remarkable role in adapting online novels into derivative works such as animations. For example, a studio in Hangzhou, esat China's Zhejiang Province, began large-scale creation of animated series adapted from online novels using AI-generated text and image processing this year. A 100-minute animated series that previously took at least six months to produce can now be completed in a month.
AI accelerates overseas promotion of online Chinese cultural works
