April 23 is the birthday of Egg Walden, the "painter" character in NetEase's game "Identity V". It is also the "Stop Krypton Day" initiated by some players to boycott AI drawing. The game officially released a birthday greeting on Weibo, but in the comment area filled with "Happy Birthday", you can still see messages like this: "Resist AI, respect creation, and respect artists."
The cause of the matter is that "Identity V" released fashion posters of the "Lucky" and "Prophet" characters on April 11. It was pointed out that there were many traces of AI drawing, such as "a tripod inserted in a beaker", "a shoe is directly stretched", "only four fingers", etc. A game that was awarded extra points for its art style was suspected of using AI for creation. This made some players feel that they had been betrayed. They decided to stop paying for the game on April 23.
Just two days before players stopped selling Krypton, iQiyi announced that hundreds of artists had signed consent forms and agreed to join the artist library of Nadou Pro, its film and television production platform, to facilitate AIGC creators to select artists. Authorization of artists' portraits is a sensitive area. Adding up the misinformation in executives' statements and some media reports, public opinion exploded instantly. iQiyi had to urgently provide clarification, and its founder and CEO Gong Yu even posted four Weibo posts to further explain.
Interestingly, while iQiyi was involved in controversy, ByteDance was revealed to have completed a round of internal adjustments. Jin Huanglong, the former head of Tomato Novel products and operations, has been appointed as the head of Douyin’s live broadcast business, reporting to Douyin President Han Shangyou. The rapidly growing Tomato novel has also been criticized by the author for its "AI training supplementary protocol".
2026 is the tenth year since Douyin was born. In the past ten years, byte-based free content has had an all-round impact on paid content platforms. Facing the AI era, the latter increasingly shows its urgent pursuit of technology. After all, this is not only related to cost control, but also represents an opportunity that may change your destiny. However, the speed of bytes is obviously faster and the tolerance seems to be more, but the burden of these platforms is heavier - their past achievements are derived from countless flashes of inspiration and are the efforts of the creators; but for AI, that is just nourishment.
"Identity V" "Stop Krypton" controversy
On April 23, under the official birthday greeting Weibo of "Identity V" for the "painter" character Eiger Walden, a Brazilian player commented: "This character who is a painter will be ashamed of you. You have still remained silent about your use of artificial intelligence, have not responded to fans, and have fired several artists in the company."
What this player is talking about is a number of suspected AI drawing errors that appeared in related promotional videos and posters during the anniversary celebration of "Identity V". On social platforms such as Weibo and Xiaohongshu, some players have made detailed summaries, including but not limited to: the round eyes of the "Cheerleader" character are drawn into inverted triangular eyes; the left and right hands of the "Lucky One" and "Prophet" characters are missing a finger; the books on the bookshelf are inexplicably connected together; the character's eighth anniversary birthday avatar "smells very AI"...
Angry players left messages on the official Weibo account of "Identity V", demanding that the game "stop using AI," "stop experimenting," "redraw posters," "reject generative AI, stop krypton if you don't apologize, and don't pay for AI." Some players have chosen to stop paying for the game on April 23, which is the birthday of the "painter" character Egg Walden. The character's paintbrush can preserve the beauty, and they also hope to get an official statement and apology in exchange for the human paintbrush taking control of game creation.
Image source: Screenshot of the power plant from the "Identity V" Weibo comment area
After all, one of the key elements of "Identity V" that attracts players is the art style. The Gothic painting style is dark and mysterious, the characters are exquisite and artistic, and the details such as accessories, light and shadow are extremely fitting. However, it costs money to collect all of this, from in-game skins to derived dolls and other peripherals. In addition to luck, it is also inseparable from krypton gold.
As of press time, players still have not waited for the desired results. According to a player who started to join the game in 2022 and paid nearly 20,000 yuan, AI is now used in game videos and character posters. "Will modeling and various art be fully covered by AI in the future? This is a trampling on the love of players and creators."
She wrote in Xiaohongshu notes calling on players to participate in the collective suspension of Krypton: "I am really chilled and disappointed. I believe no one wants to see the self-promotion melted into a human form. Can Identity V be worthy of those who really love this game and these characters and create for them? With so many things exposed at once, do you have time to delete hundreds and thousands of comments under the official account that resist AI, time to correct AI omissions, and no time to give players an explanation?"
Because he boycotted the AI under the birthday greetings of the "painter" character Egg Walden on Weibo, the aforementioned Brazilian player was regarded by some players who love the character as "looking for trouble with his own birthday post" and "disrespecting the character." His response to this was: "Even if this post is about my favorite character, I will still protest because I will only be happy when I see this character owned by a company that truly cares about them... If you like this character, you should also fight to keep him in a game without AI... especially on his birthday."
"Artist Library" and "Celebrity Faces" in Short Plays
NetEase is a game manufacturer that actively uses AI. At the fourth quarter and full-year financial report and performance meeting in 2025, a piece of public information was: In 2025, NetEase will comprehensively deepen AI applications. "AI native pipelines will be deployed on a large scale in art, planning, programming, animation and quality assurance, and the efficiency of some links will increase by 300%." NetEase CEO Ding Lei said that the company is committed to creating "AI experts who know the most about games" and realizing all-round and deeply integrated efficient AI applications. To this end, the company will continue to maintain high-intensity investment in vertical models, AI native gameplay and talent echelons.
Cost reduction and efficiency improvement are usually the main starting points for content platforms to embrace AI. Similar to Ding Lei, iQiyi founder and CEO Gong Yu has repeatedly emphasized the role of AI in the platform, whether at the TV series production industry conference, online audio-visual conference or the annual conference held by iQiyi. In addition to announcing its transformation into a "decentralized social media", iQiyi opened its film and television production platform Natto Pro for commercial use and included its IP library, artist library, and digital asset library.
Image source: iQiyi
The "artist library" here can be simply understood as a material library of celebrity IPs, which facilitates AIGC creators to select artists and then communicate and cooperate with them through iQiyi. This is where the controversy that aroused public opinion came from. However, when executives’ statements and misinformation in some media reports were superimposed, artists were busy refuting the rumors and netizens were eager to criticize. It seemed that no one cared about iQiyi’s original wording, who the hundreds of avatars were, and what the so-called artist library meant.
Before the long-form video platform put this matter on the table, the short drama had already been secretly revealed. If you are an in-depth user of Hongguo’s short dramas, then you will always come across a few AI simulation short drama characters that hit the faces of celebrities. The teams of artists such as Yang Zi, Yi Yang Qianxi, Ren Jialun, Wang Hedi, Shen Yue, etc. have issued statements resolutely resisting "AI face-changing".
On April 6, Hongguo Short Drama issued the "Announcement on the Continuous Management of Illegal Use of AI Short Drama Materials", which launched a special centralized management of the recent illegal use of AI short drama materials. It has completed a comprehensive inspection of 15,000 works and dealt with 670 illegal works in accordance with regulations. AI-generated content that uses the image of an actor is one of the typical cases.
But before it was removed from the shelves, traffic harvesting had already been completed. Some fans who were dissatisfied with this said they didn't even know if they had contributed to the views by clicking in to report it. Of course, reporting is still useful. A practitioner of AI simulator short dramas mentioned that when generating character images, popular celebrities "will never touch" them because they have "too many fans." The implication of this sentence is that actors below the waist may be targeted by "AI face-changing".
Currently, fan clubs of some artists have announced bans on AI content generation and other behaviors. In fact, the core controversy of "AI face-changing" lies in the infringement of other people's portrait rights and reputation rights, which requires explicit authorization and consent from the rights holder. There is no shortage of similar demand scenarios in the film and television industry: shooting of more difficult and risky scenes such as special effects actions; unexpected situations that make reshoots impossible and have to be restored, etc. But apart from these special scenes, as Guo Jingyu, chairman of Changxin Media, said: "Why do we have to let AI make a dummy to act in a drama that can be acted by real people? Is this necessary?"
AI penetration in all directions, the choice of the content industry
Compared with the two media forms of pictures and videos, AI has eroded text more extensively and has a deeper impact. Every user-oriented AI assistant is "taken from users and used for users." Social platforms with embedded AI capabilities are also not immune. In the comment area of WeChat public account articles, it is extremely common for Yuanbao to summarize the article; Weibo Zhisou, after being "fed" by a large number of marketing accounts, not only gives outrageous answers, but has even gradually become a hotbed of fake news.
Specific to the creative process, online literature platforms such as Qidian Chinese Network under China Literature Group, Qimao Chinese Network under Baidu, and Tomato Novel under ByteDance have built-in AI functions in their respective official writing tools to assist writing. What's special about Tomato Novel is that it is the first platform to clearly state in the work signing agreement that it will use the content of the author's works for AI training, thus triggering large-scale discussions. At that time, an author described this process as "capital squeezes the children of real authors into bone mush and feeds them to AI, which then regurgitates them and feeds them to readers."
Although Tomato Novel deleted the AI-related clauses in the agreement and stated that "it has not published any purely AI-written works, nor will it use AI writing capabilities against the author's personal wishes," the author can hardly breathe a sigh of relief. Because "traffic has deteriorated" and "AI routines have increased", "there are no AIs that real people can write, so the traffic will naturally be diverted away".
On February 4, 2026, Tomato Novel issued an announcement saying that it would launch a special rectification operation to focus on cracking down on violations of large-scale mass production of low-quality content, including "abuse of AI tools to mass-generate and piece together content, works that lack originality and logic, blunt language, empty content, and 'shoddy production'" and "for the purpose of 'large-scale mass production,' batch updates of multiple low-quality works in a single day, maliciously seizing platform traffic resources, and ignoring content quality" and other behaviors.
In the past ten years, Byte has re-educated the content industry in a free way with traffic and algorithms. The development of AI has given it another weapon. In contrast, paid content platforms have a heavier burden - they started from this, and content is the foundation of everything. How AI will affect content can only be tried and adjusted at the same time.
A paradoxical phenomenon is that on the one hand, some users marvel at the efficiency improvements and emotional comfort brought by generative AI, but on the other hand, they cannot accept the participation of their content consumption objects through AI. Between usage behavior and resistance lies the all-round penetration of AI and the anxiety generated based on this penetration.
Film director Jia Zhangke’s views may serve as a reference. His view is that the development of new technologies is unstoppable, but attention needs to be paid to and the survival conditions of relevant practitioners in the industry chain need to be taken into consideration. Take the film industry as an example. No matter how technological innovations have improved, the format of the broadcast itself and the appearance of the creative group have not changed. However, AI may cause the middle link to be missing.
However, if collective creation ceases to exist, can AI once again bring about moments of creative inspiration? In Jia Zhangke's view, whether it is literature, art or film creation, "We all come into contact with the world with a physical sense of life, and those shining places are accidents, sometimes even mistakes, and unplanned things." Confused creators don’t know the answers to these questions, and platforms that actively embrace AI have yet to answer them.