ExclusiveChina’s Fake AI Actress Is Making Millions… While Exporting “Attention Fentanyl” to America

Meet the hottest new actress in China. 400,000 followers, 250 million views. She's pulling 36,000 bucks a video. Her face got pores, her makeup fades by lunch. She actually sweats on the stairs. And she is not real. Not one bit of her. Her name is Fang Taozi. Three people and a computer built her in a couple of days flat. Meanwhile, a real actor with nearly 200 mini dramas under his belt ran out of work and went home to grow chilies. So are we talking about AI replacing actors? That's not even the real story here. The real story is the machine underneath it all. Chinese mini dramas are vertical phone shows, often 60-100 episodes, each 1-2 minutes long. Typically, a billionaire falls for a delivery girl, a mistreated wife is secretly an heiress, or someone dies, comes back and gets revenge. Every minute needs a secret, a slap, or a cliffhanger. Very subtle. Last year, nearly 700 million Chinese watched the mini dramas, about 68% of the internet users. They attract people of all ages, with young viewers leading, but older viewers making up a surprisingly big share too. It's absorbing everyone. And this shift is happening overseas too. Chinese-backed Real Short launched in 2022 and quickly took off with American Women, who got hooked on its over-the-top romances. Revenue went from $97 million in 2023 to a projected $1.05 billion in 2026, all from getting viewers to pay to unlock the next episode. So yes, instant noodles for the brain. Cheap, fast, and aggressively flavored. Well, the problem begins when every meal becomes instant noodles. Some people call this fentanyl for the attention span. Honestly, I would say it may be worse. The danger isn't only that people keep watching. It's what this media diet can numb. Reality takes patience. You sit with uncertainty, examine evidence, and listen to people you disagree with. Mini dramas replace that with constant emotional acceleration. Before one idea settles, another explosion hits. There's scientific evidence behind that concern. In three controlled experiments published in NPJ Science of Learning, people watching short videos remembered less and showed weaker coordination between the brain systems responsible for attention, memory, and cognitive control. There's another experiment from a 2023 CHI study on TikTok-style rapid-switching finding people became significantly worse at remembering and completing a planned task. One mini-drama won't turn your brain into mashed potatoes, but hours of nonstop addictive viewing can do more damage than we'd like to admit. Especially for kids whose brains are still developing. The bigger risk is a culture so used to constant stimulation that sitting still, staying calm, and thinking clearly starts to feel strangely difficult. That matters, because societies depend on people being able to do exactly the opposite, pause, listen, try to understand others, be kind and considerate, work together across differences. Kindness, patience, and rational thinking are not just personal virtues. They are part of the social glue that keeps people from turning every disagreement into a fight. A culture that loses those habits becomes easier to divide, easier to manipulate, and much harder to reason with. And China is exporting the formula. From the CCP's perspective, this is not simply about exporting entertainment. It is part of a broader competition with the West for influence. China openly talks about telling Chinese stories, but there's a less obvious layer. Shaping how Western young people consume information, behave, and think. TikTok is the obvious example. The mini-dramas may be another, but through a different strategy. Capture attention, shorten patience, and reward emotional reaction, and gradually reshape habits. It is fentanyl for the attention span. So that is what makes this kind of influence so dangerous. You don't have to convince people to support a regime. You only have to slowly weaken the cultural and intellectual foundations of the society you're competing against. No soldiers, no missiles. Just one more episode. And AI makes that pipeline even faster. Each episode of The Laid-Off Girl reportedly took two or three days and more than ¥10,000, which is about $1,400 in computing power. Humans still wrote, directed, edited, and corrected it. But AI cut out all the traditional cast and shrank the crew. The director Li Di said a project that once needed more than 40 people could now be made by five. That is incredibly powerful. Maybe that's why the actor Zhang Xiaolei, who once reportedly made $3,000 to $4,000 a month playing dominant CEOs, has now invested his savings in a chili farm. AI can give small creators production quality, effects, and speed that were once out of reach. Use it well, it can help people make better content faster while keeping humans in control. But the same pipeline works the other way too. If the content is shallow, manipulative, or designed to exploit attention, AI can produce more of it faster and cheaper than ever. So the question is, who controls the tool and what they choose to build with it? AI should accelerate human creativity, not automate human manipulation. Basically, AI determines how fast noodles are cooked, what governments and platforms regulate what goes into the packet, and we decide whether to keep eating. That's all for today. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.