Recent reports indicate that the AI short drama market is expanding rapidly, with growing demand for virtual character images, leading to the emergence of a gray market trade chain centered around face assets.
According to short drama practitioners, many current projects only film basic actor footage, relying on AI to generate the final complete episodes. Some production teams solicit portrait consent from actors and ordinary people to build virtual character asset libraries, with licensing fees ranging from hundreds to over a thousand yuan per face.
Beyond formal licensed transactions, the industry has developed various commercial cooperation models: many MCN agencies waive one-time fees for portrait licensing, offering free use of their influencers' facial portraits in exchange for a share of traffic revenue after the AI short dramas are released.
Meanwhile, various advertising companies adopt a standardized sales approach, signing cooperation agreements to package and sell AI face asset resource bundles, providing ready-made virtual character materials for short drama producers.
On second-hand trading platforms, the barrier to selling these AI face asset resource bundles is extremely low. For just 19.8 yuan, buyers can receive nearly 500 modern face assets via cloud storage links from merchants, including multi-angle reference images for male and female leads, supporting characters, and children.
Merchants also promise that the assets carry no copyright risks, claiming that the images are generated through AI tool-based fusion and adjustment, with each image costing only 0.02–0.04 yuan.
However, the AI assets touted by merchants are mostly sourced from real-person images arbitrarily scraped from the internet. Merchants revealed that they search for keywords such as "Chinese," "fashion," and "beauties" on overseas social media platforms to collect original images, which are then processed using AI "face-swapping" technology before being sold.
Merchants also stated that there is higher market demand for female character images. They have even accepted orders to produce thousands of face images at once, with the entire process carried out without obtaining portrait consent from the individuals involved.
Addressing this chaos, lawyers stated that under the Civil Code, no one may arbitrarily create, disclose, or use another person's portrait without their consent, nor forge portraits using information technology.
Using "face-swapped" images for short drama production and promotion without authorization is highly likely to be deemed portrait infringement. The final determination depends on factors such as usage context, scope of dissemination, subjective intent, and consequences of damage. If AI-generated images are maliciously defamed or paired with false content for dissemination, it will also infringe upon the individual's right to reputation.
Directly scraping netizens' photos in bulk from social media platforms as raw material for face-swapping carries even higher risks. If merchants extensively collect and provide sensitive personal information such as facial data to others, or use generated images to spread false information, they may commit the crime of infringing on citizens' personal information in serious cases, thereby facing criminal liability.