State TV airs China’s first AI-developed cartoon series, as Sora sets off frenzy for text-to-video generation tech

The 26-episode series, which debuted on Monday, features some of the most fabled classical Chinese poetry and their backstories, with each instalment lasting around 7 minutes, according to a statement published on the WeChat account of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

GenAI – including China Media’s CMG Media GPT, a model trained using the broadcaster’s vast trove of video and audio materials and SAIL’s AI technology – was used in every stage of the production process, from art design to video generation and post-production, SAIL said.

CMG Media GPT was trained by feeding it with a large amount of data, enabling it to generate artwork and animated scenes that embody the style of traditional Chinese ink-wash paintings and conform with the architecture design and appearance of people from ancient times.

“The CMG Media GPT provides animation producers with a low-cost and efficient concept-design tool for character and scene designs,” SAIL said in the statement.

The cartoon show came after the state broadcaster pledged to fully adopt the new technology.

“We will delve deeper into technological innovation, embrace the internet and AI … [and] build a ‘powerful engine’ and ‘driving force’ for a new type of international mainstream media,” Shen Haixiong, head of China Media, said at the group’s working conference last week, according to a company WeChat post.

Shen’s pledge echoed calls from China’s state asset manager to make AI an integral part of their development plans and accelerate their push into the AI sector.

The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) held a seminar last week to promote the development and use of AI across central state-owned enterprises (SOEs). These are firms managed directly by the State Council, China’s cabinet, or its authorised agencies, such as the Finance Ministry.

The SASAC urged SOEs to embrace the “profound changes” brought upon by the new technology trend, and to give AI development higher priority while putting resources into the most needed and advantageous areas.

While state-owned CMG Group is not a central SOE, it has jumped on the AI bandwagon along with other Chinese companies, including Big Tech firms.

Central SOEs have total assets of 86.6 trillion yuan (US$12 trillion) at the end of 2023.

By comparison, the market value of China-listed internet firms, which are at the forefront of domestic efforts to build Chinese equivalents of ChatGPT, totalled 11.1 trillion yuan by the end of first quarter of 2023, according to the latest figures from the state-affiliated China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

The SASAC has asked SOEs to play a bigger role in the nation’s AI development and seize the opportunity to boost high-quality growth.