Is Half of China's AI Compute Really Being Spent on Slop?

A viral claim that 55% of China's AI tokens go to short dramas and video generation — traced to a June investor call by COL Group — has drawn rebuttals from ByteDance, which says video generation is only about 10% of its own compute, and from People's Daily. Over 90% of the roughly 430,000 micro-dramas released in the first eight months of 2026 were AI productions, and a five-second 720p clip on ByteDance's Seedance costs around 100,000 tokens.