AI micro-dramas do not understand people. Are we starting not to either?

(Edited and refined by Grace Chong, with the assistance of AI translation.)

Don’t mock me for having nothing better to do, but lately I’ve found myself doing something I’m almost ashamed to admit: watching AI-generated micro-dramas.

I don’t watch them in the spirit of appreciating a good film. Quite the opposite. I often watch while complaining: “How can this be so bad? How can it be so ridiculous?” And yet I don’t swipe away. Why? Because I want to see just how bad it can get. Perhaps, too, I’m secretly trying to prove that I’m a little smarter than whoever came up with these stories — that I can predict every twist before it happens.

This is a side of human nature we would rather not admit to. We are drawn not only to beautiful things, but also to things that are astonishingly bad. In theoretical terms, this might be called “cynical cognition”: knowing perfectly well that you’re hooked, yet carrying on anyway — not resisting the experience, but cursing it while still playing along.

Micro-drama producers understand this psychology all too well. They give you three minutes, then cut the story off at the crucial moment, tempting you to pay or download an app to keep watching. More cleverly still, once you finish one drama, the platform decides you must love them and starts feeding you another, then another.

AI gets better; human nature doesn’t

At first, the micro-dramas I encountered were in Chinese. Then I discovered that the English-speaking world has its own versions of the same plots: the domineering CEO falls for a cleaner; the delivery rider turns out to be the chairman of the world’s largest conglomerate and once he reveals his identity, everyone is practically falling over themselves to kneel before him.

I kept watching to see whether AI had improved. In the past, a character might suddenly sprout six fingers on one hand. Those glitches are less common now. The spatial relationships can still feel distinctly uncanny when someone opens a door, turns around or walks out of a room, but AI models have clearly made progress.

The stories, however, have barely improved. Technological progress has fixed the “six fingers” glitches, but it has not fixed human nature.

For example, a mother in a micro-drama can show utterly inhuman favouritism towards her eldest son, forcing her younger son to give up his property, job and marriage. A biological daughter who has been separated from the family for years finally comes home, only for the entire family to close ranks around a manipulative adopted daughter and subject their own daughter to endless humiliation.

The characters are not complex; they simply lack the emotional texture of normal human beings. Kinship, love and dignity exist only to set up the dramatic pay-offs that come later: the villains’ humiliation, revenge and the revelation of hidden identities.

Of course, literature and drama do not have to reproduce real life, and myths, wuxia stories and science fiction can sometimes express human nature more profoundly. What truly makes me uncomfortable is not that these stories are “unrealistic”, but that they seem to have no interest at all in understanding real people.

How human nature gets compressed

Why, then, do people keep watching such absurd plots?

One reason is that they offer a form of stress relief. You watch to find out when that outrageously biased mother will finally get what she deserves, or when the humiliated daughter will reveal her true identity. We already have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen next, yet we still want to see whether our predictions come true.

When we are right, there is a subtle sense of satisfaction. When we are wrong, we want to see just how much further the writer can take the absurdity. After a while, whether the story itself makes sense no longer matters.

It is similar to the way we repeatedly consume things we already know. Familiarity is not as tiresome as we imagine; often, it is comforting. We listen to old songs, rewatch old dramas and return to familiar restaurants not because we want to discover something new, but because familiarity reduces the cognitive effort required to make sense of the world.

In a world shaped by algorithmic recommendations, platforms keep feeding us more of the same, continually rewarding a kind of low-cost cognition.

In AI micro-dramas, for example, a mother does not need a life of her own; she only needs to perform the function of showing favouritism. A poor person does not need to actually change their fate; discovering that their biological parents are wealthy, or winning the lottery, is enough to complete their “comeback”. Complex human nature is compressed into a single function.

In real life, it takes a person many years to study, work, suffer setbacks and grow. In a micro-drama, all of that can happen in a few minutes.

Real people contain both good and bad. Micro-dramas spare us the trouble, making the good people simply good and the bad people simply bad. Understanding a real person is exhausting; recognising a label is easy.

Over time, I worry that we may lose the patience required to understand complexity.

When truth stops mattering

A few years ago, I read a short book by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit.

Frankfurt was not discussing lies, but an attitude that is, in some ways, more troubling than lying. A liar, after all, still knows what is true, because otherwise they could not deliberately lead people towards what is false. Bullshitters are different. They simply do not care what the truth is, only whether something serves their purpose. The danger lies not in telling falsehoods, but in no longer respecting truth itself.

This is the problem with many AI micro-dramas. They are not merely fictional; they are increasingly indifferent to what real human nature actually looks like. Characters do not need to conform to our experience of life, as long as they conform to the logic of attracting views. The plot does not need to resemble reality, as long as it can keep generating humiliation and comebacks.

Why is the mother so biased? Why is the tycoon so cold-hearted? These are not questions the stories genuinely want to answer. They only want to know whether you will keep watching.

They flatten complex people into a handful of easily recognisable labels: the biased mother; the delivery rider who suddenly turns his life around. The characters do not need to grow; they only need to perform the function assigned to them by the plot.

Genuine growth means that, through time and setbacks, a person gradually becomes someone different. In micro-dramas, “growth” often means simply discovering that you were born into a wealthy family all along.

The pursuit of truth is never easy

Watching a few micro-dramas is hardly enough to make us lose our judgement. But if we watch them repeatedly over a long period, our brains may gradually become accustomed to stories that are easiest to understand and easiest to predict.

Over time, what we seek may no longer be the truth, but something that feels “real enough”. We may also become less and less willing to take the time to understand a complex person, preferring instead to apply a label. Reality gradually becomes something we no longer feel is worth taking seriously.

Because the pursuit of truth is never easy. It requires us to acknowledge that reality is more complicated than we think, and to be willing to tolerate uncertainty for a little longer. Over-simplified narratives offer the quickest judgements and the most gratifying emotions, but what they wear away are our very standards for what’s real.

Writers once had to put some thought into creating stories. Now the characters are virtual, the writer is AI, and the audience is reduced to no longer having to think.

This is not progress. It is laziness.

Having written all this, I think I’ve decided to stop watching these micro-dramas and let these micro-drama ghosts disappear from my screen.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “让人弱智的人工智能短剧”.

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