Chinese Netflix Competitor Opens Floodgates to AI Slop

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It may be the beginning of the end for the global legions of C-drama fans.

iQIYI, the Chinese streaming service known for its massive library of Asian films and TV shows, is anticipating that AI will create the majority of its content in just five years, Bloomberg reports.

In an interview at iQIYI’s annual content showcase, CEO Gong Yu presented a sweeping AI vision so divorced from the company’s roots as a Netflix-style service that it has shades of Mark Zuckerberg’s aborted pivot to building an entire “Metaverse.” Per Bloomberg‘s paraphrasing of Yu’s remarks, the Beijing-based streamer plans to convert its website and video app into a “social media destination that hosts mainly AI-generated content” — content it hopes will be made using its own model.

On Monday, the service launched its Nadou Pro suite, an all-in-one AI toolkit designed to handle every aspect of filmmaking, from screenwriting to storyboards and video generation. The company says Nadou Pro has already been used to make films during internal testing, but that’s not the extent of its vision. iQIYI is also planning to release an AI-generated film this summer, one it hopes will be a genuine box office success rather than an overlooked experiment.

A version of the facelifted iQIYI app was unveiled on Monday. Striking when the iron is hot, executives hope to capture the mass appeal of OpenAI’s video generator app Sora, which unexpectedly shut down last month.

“It’s once in a decade,” Gong said of the opportunity to an audience of producers and directors at the content showcase, per Bloomberg. “We have to take the tide as it comes.”

In the meantime, iQIYI will release 16 Nadou-produced films on the platform  — the opening salvo before its anticipated onslaught of AI content. iIQIYI will even pay filmmakers that use its AI tool an additional 20 percent cut of advertising and membership fees, Gong said.

iQIYI’s expansive AI vision comes amid a swell of unrest in Hollywood over how the tech could disrupt the industry, sparked by the impressive capabilities of the latest video generating models like Google’s Veo 3 and ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0. Some insiders say AI is already pervasive in the industry and others fatalistically claim that an AI takeover is inevitable, though many examples of movie-like AI footage have turned out to be misleadingly presented. There’re also nagging questions about the economic feasibility of AI video generation. Sora, OpenAI’s app that iQIYI is hoping to eat the lunch of, was reportedly losing over $1 million per day before being shut down.

It also comes during a less-than-outstanding year at the Chinese box office, with the runaway success of “Ne Zha 2,” which released on the first day of the Chinese New Year holiday in 2025, proving a tough act to follow. Domestic sales during this year’s Chinese New Year week plunged by nearly 40 percent, with one report suggesting it was the lowest figure since 2018. iQiyi’s own revenue is estimated to have fallen by 13 percent in the first quarter of this year, Bloomberg reported.

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IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Watch the Interviews