Conditional Acceptance of AI in Chinese Micro-Dramas: Emotional Payoff, Human Creative Labour, and Genre Expectations

Chinese micro-drama has become a major platform-native screen form, defined by compressed episode length, rapid production cycles, affective hooks and intense audience engagement. Existing scholarship has shown that micro-drama production is shaped by writer–audience–platform feedback loops, data-responsive iteration and the growing use of AI-assisted creative tools. However, audience responses to AI involvement itself remain less well understood. This article examines how public audience comments respond to perceived or disclosed AI involvement in Chinese micro-dramas, and what those responses reveal about the perceived value of human creative labour in a platform-native entertainment format. Using a qualitative-dominant mixed-method analysis of public comments on selected Chinese micro-dramas across a spectrum of human-led, AI-assisted and AI-dominant production, the study examines audience responses by AI recognition, evaluative stance, emotional engagement, narrative quality, visual/technical quality, authenticity, production effort and genre expectation. The article argues that audience responses to AI involvement are unlikely to be reducible to simple acceptance or rejection. Instead, they are mediated by genre expectations: viewers may tolerate or even welcome AI when it delivers spectacle, novelty, emotional intensity or efficient entertainment, but criticise it when it produces emotional thinness, visual uncanniness, formulaic repetition or perceived low-effort production. The article contributes to research on Chinese digital media, AI-assisted creative labour and audience reception by shifting attention from audience feedback as production input to audience discourse as a site where human authorship and AI involvement are publicly evaluated.