Christine Li is a model and influencer, but not an actor, so when she saw herself playing a cruel character in a Chinese microdrama she felt bewildered, then angry and afraid.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old is one of two people who said their likenesses were cast without consent in the AI-generated show ‘The Peach Blossom Hairpin’, which ran on Hongguo, a major microdrama app owned by Tiktok parent company ByteDance.<\/p>\n
Ms Li plans to sue the drama makers and the platform, highlighting new legal and regulatory grey areas created by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
“I was genuinely shocked. It was clearly me,” said Ms Li, who lives in Hangzhou in eastern China. “It was so obvious that they used a specific set of photos I took two years ago” and had posted on social media, she said.<\/p>\n
Microdramas are ultra-short, online soap operas hugely popular in China and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
When Ms Li’s fans alerted her to the series, she was horrified to find her digital twin shown slapping women and mistreating animals.<\/p>\n
“I also felt a deep fear. I kept wondering what kind of person would do something like this,” Li said.<\/p>\n
Hongguo hosts thousands of free, small-sized shows – both live-action and AI-generated – whose episodes are two or three minutes long.<\/p>\n
As of October, the platform had around 245 million monthly active users, according to data cited by Wenwen Han, president of the Short Drama Alliance.<\/p>\n
A Hongguo statement in early April said it had taken the series down because the producers had violated platform rules and contractual obligations.<\/p>\n
Man portrayed in microdrama as a ‘sleazy’ antagonist<\/p>\n
AI’s ability to mimic real people has sparked global concern for actors’ jobs, and over such deepfakes being used for scams and propaganda.<\/p>\n
Ms Li and a man who says he was portrayed as her AI husband in the series, which became a hit last month on Hongguo, spoke out online about their separate unwelcome discoveries.<\/p>\n
But even as their stories sparked a public outcry about AI ethics, AFP saw that The Peach Blossom Hairpin kept running for days before its removal, with the disputed characters quietly replaced.<\/p>\n
The man, a stylist specialised in traditional Chinese clothing and make-up, had posted photos of himself in costume on the Instagram-like Xiaohongshu app.<\/p>\n
Like Ms Li, he was upset by the “ugly” portrayal of his likeness as a “sleazy” antagonist in the show.<\/p>\n
“Will it have an impact on me, on my job, on my future work opportunities?” said the man, who asked to use the pseudonym Baicai.<\/p>\n
To keep audiences hooked, microdramas are often full of shocking, larger-than-life moments.<\/p>\n
Ms Li and Mr Baicai both showed AFP their original photos and the characters in The Peach Blossom Hairpin, which bore a strong resemblance.<\/p>\n
For low-budget AI microdramas, Chinese regulations say platforms must be the primary checkpoint for potentially dodgy content.<\/p>\n
If they do not carry out mandatory content reviews, the videos will be forcibly taken down, according to the National Radio and Television Administration.<\/p>\n
If the platforms were aware of any infringement but failed to act on it, parties affected can alert China’s cyberspace authorities which can impose administrative penalties, according to Zhao Zhanling, a partner at Beijing Javy Law Firm.<\/p>\n
Hongguo said in a second statement this month it would continue to strengthen how it reviews content and how it authorises creators, among other steps.<\/p>\n
It said it had dealt with 670 AI microdramas that violated regulations, with most taken down, and warned it would crack down on repeated breaches.<\/p>\n
When approached for comment, parent company Bytedance referred AFP to the two Hongguo statements.<\/p>\n
Ms Li and Mr Baicai say they need more information from Hongguo to confirm the identity of the drama’s creator.<\/p>\n
National regulations require microdrama makers to register to obtain a licence – a step made mandatory for AI-generated animations from this month.<\/p>\n
Lawyers told AFP that compensation for plaintiffs like Ms Li likely won’t amount to much due to the limited commercial value of an ordinary likeness.<\/p>\n
Ms Li worries that the saga may cost her opportunities in the modelling industry, as she is now “associated with controversy”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christine Li is a model and influencer, but not an actor, so when she saw herself playing a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-414956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}