Kuaishou's Kling model backed China's first AI micro-drama

What was announced or recorded

Kuaishou released its Kling video model on 6 June 2024, and by mid-July its short-drama arm had used it to back what Chinese reporting calls the country's first AI-generated micro-drama. The Beijing News, reporting on 11 September 2024, states that on 13 July 2024 the domestic first AIGC original fantasy micro-drama, Mirage of the Mountain and Sea (山海奇镜之劈波斩浪), launched with Kling providing "deep technical support." The same report records that on 9 September 2024 Kuaishou announced a follow-on programme pairing Kling with nine named directors, including Li Shaohong and Jia Zhangke, to produce nine roughly three-minute AIGC short films. Kling's own product page, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, describes a current "Video 3.0" model with native 4K output, but does not itself name Kuaishou or state a launch date.

What the documents establish

The reporting establishes a specific chain: a general-purpose model, released in June, was applied within weeks to a genre-specific commissioning programme, then extended into a directors' initiative naming individuals by name — a fast model-to-production pipeline, per the article's own figures showing Kling had served "over 1.6 million users" and generated "25 million images and 16 million videos" by the time of the report. Separately, China's Measures for Labeling AI-Generated and Synthesized Content, issued 7 March 2025 and effective 1 September 2025, establish the regulatory backdrop such output now sits under: platforms must detect and display labels on AI-generated video, through metadata or explicit markers, and build labelling into user agreements and distribution logs. The measure post-dates the drama's July 2024 launch, so it did not govern that release at the time.

Announced versus delivered

What was delivered, per the reporting, is a completed five-episode micro-drama and a named nine-director programme, not merely an announced slate. What remains a projection rather than a delivered fact is the claim, attributed to unnamed industry voices, that industrial-grade production tools are one to two years away; that is a forecast inside a news report, not a company statement of a shipping product, and this dossier does not extend it further. Kling's own page, for its part, documents present-day capability rather than the 2024 state of the model, so the two sources describe different points in the same product's history.

What to watch

Editorially, the labelling measure's 1 September 2025 effective date is the marker to watch for future AI-generated dramas: whether a platform visibly labels an AI-made short as such, per the measure's requirement, is now a checkable fact for any release after that date, distinct from whatever a producer's press materials claim about method.

• Was the content published before or after the labelling measure's effective date?
• Does the platform display a visible AI-generated label, or only embed metadata a viewer cannot see?
• Which parts of a credited AIGC production were model-generated, and which were directed, shot or edited conventionally?

A model release, a commissioned drama and a labelling law arrived within fourteen months of each other; treating them as one story obscures that only the last is a binding requirement rather than a company's own account of its work.