AI Modification Crackdown! Is the Multiverse of Absurdity That's Been Raging for Months Finally Heading to Endgame?

So, in this AI-dominated era, we still need seasoned artists to step up.

Just a few days ago, the National Radio and Television Administration finally issued a notice — announcing that from January 1, 2026, a month-long special campaign to regulate “AI-remixed videos” would be launched.

That’s right, after several evolutions, AI videos have finally faced the iron fist.

Let’s think back — AI videos really did seem to dominate the entire 2025. Even I, the connoisseur of trash, felt like a cuckold kneeling and wailing: the absurd culture of the Chinese internet has become the face of AI videos.

With the development of AI technology, a simple meme can spawn thousands of variations in less than a day. The variety, the polish, the speed — heights that creators of the past could never dream of reaching.

Bro Absurd, is this the kind of creation speed that independent creators of the past could achieve?

And with the advancement of AI, this speed keeps breaking records! Absurdist content creation has shifted from the solo-output workshop model to a scaled, integrated assembly line. Just give them a simple object, and they’ll give you back an entire world.

I don’t know much about other fields, but in the past few months alone, I’ve witnessed the birth of the Sister Yu universe, the Mambo universe, the Dong Zhuo universe — and many more.

Back in the day, you had to dig through multiple sites to find this kind of twisted stuff. Now, it shows up on your recommended feeds like it’s being wholesaled out. With algorithmic boosting, your homepage gets flooded with it.

Sometimes, I marvel at my own unique taste — if it weren’t for these guys, my video platforms wouldn’t look so ugly.

It’s not that I dislike AI videos. I know that absurdist culture, with AI’s help, has indeed become the most dazzling oddity on the Chinese internet. And it’s precisely AI’s ability to morph into anything, anywhere, that allows every character to go where they shouldn’t, creating all sorts of dramatic effects.

So, is there really a need to clean it up?

Let me put it in a crude analogy: AI videos are like cyber cockroaches. They feed on internet sentiment and multiply massively. Once you see one, you know there are countless others hiding in the same category. And inside the information cocoon, these invisible roaches are far more terrifying than you think.

Think about it — doesn’t that suddenly feel a bit creepy? Those absurd videos aren’t as harmless as everyone thinks. Who knows where AI might be using the faces of Sister Yu, Lü Bu, or Tokai Teio to do something bizarre.

If this cult-like AI technology were only in the hands of a small elite, it might be fine. Then it would just be a limited circle enjoying it.

But the key issue is that this “cyber cockroach” breeding technique spreads online at near-zero cost. Anyone with a little learning ability can raise cyber roaches painlessly. What used to take several people days of effort to produce an outrageous video can now be done with just a few prompts.

Dammit, have our video platforms turned into Getting Rich? A ton of netizens have used this to get rich (yes, some have profited from AI videos).

At first glance, isn’t that a great thing? Those seeking money make money; those seeking talent produce works; those seeking attention get views. And as the barrier to entry keeps dropping, the user base keeps expanding. Then, predictably, the unexpected happens — nowadays, some AI works have a certain creepiness to them.

No matter what you should or shouldn’t say — yellow, black, left, right…

With just an AI, resourceful netizens can always cook up something mind-blowing. But buddy, some things you dare to make, we the audience dare not watch!

So against this backdrop, the cleanup notice emerged.

I know that a cleanup campaign like this will make some excited netizens blurt out that famous line about artistic creation — “If the people love it, who are you to say otherwise?”

But this time, people might be unfairly blaming the NRTA. They haven’t denied netizens’ enthusiastic expression through AI videos at all. From start to finish, they’ve only wanted netizens to use technology properly and let AI videos return to what they originally were.

In this case, the NRTA no longer feels like the authoritarian parent everyone perceived a few years ago. Instead, they’re more like a counselor who issued repeated warnings that went unheeded, and finally had to resort to unconventional measures.

The first statement came in 2024. Back then, they were fairly restrained, merely saying there was a need for forward-looking governance of vulgar AI products.

At the time, AI-remixed videos were barely taking shape; the internet’s incubator effect hadn’t kicked in yet. So the NRTA just issued relevant management tips and standardized platform creation guidelines.

Nowadays, that little line you see under AI videos is an indirect product of those management tips. Besides that, the NRTA also gave targeted advice on remixing classics and copyright issues, all based on legitimate legal demands. For example: does remixing existing film/television works constitute infringement? Does arbitrarily adapting classic works count as nonsense?

But at the time, everyone thought the sky was falling for AI videos, and speculated whether the testing ground for AI videos — the “guichu” (鬼畜) subculture zone — would be hit.

Yet months passed, and aside from implementing the “tip” feature, nothing happened.

Meanwhile, creators pushed their creative boundaries, remixed classic works, iterated and upgraded, riding the AI tech expressway further down the unspeakable road.

Then came September 2025, when the domestic internet launched another “Qinglang” (清朗) cleanup campaign. Although AI-remixed videos weren’t the focus, the NRTA still gave them a harsh critique in the action.

Nine months had passed, and AI creators’ bad habits hadn’t improved — they’d worsened with technological progress. The official description of such videos evolved from the initial “boundless” to “excessive rendering of negative and pessimistic emotions.”

Finally, this time it became a special campaign.

Same remixing, same infringement, same deviation from classics… but this time the language is more severe. They define it as “harming industry development, interfering with minors forming correct cultural cognition and real-world perception, and severely deviating from the spiritual core of classic works.”

Remember, last time the NRTA merely thought AI remixes would “render negative emotions of depression and negativity, causing imitation.”

With this progressive emotional output, can’t you feel that the NRTA does seem a bit angry now?

After all, between these clear milestones, there were multiple warnings about technology abuse, data pollution, tool ethics, and more.

Even if they didn’t directly mention AI-remixed videos every time, their subtext was that AI videos had failed to fulfill the social responsibility expected of cultural dissemination works.

Creators didn’t take it seriously — after all, they were just editing videos, how big a deal could it be? Not only did they fail to adjust their creative boundaries in time, but under the influence of traffic, they became even more unrestrained.

We gave you a chance, but you couldn’t handle it! The NRTA, after holding back for a year, finally prepared to use its visible hand to discipline AI-remixed videos this month.

So what parts need correction? How to correct? And what should they become?

Now, let’s go back to that initial 2024 management tip. The opinion on AI remixes has always been one thing — “Adaptation is not random alteration; dramatization is not nonsense.” These twelve words have run through the entire year of AI video development, but people just haven’t paid enough attention.

After all, in this era of traffic, only views matter.

So the content got weirder and weirder, and its reach got wider and wider. Even children who hadn’t formed correct cognitive abilities got sucked into the mire of AI videos.

Although we’ve commented before on “Mom’s Must-Have Dumplings,” our final take was — everything has a limit, and it seems that limit has been crossed.

Actually, a week before the AI cleanup announcement, CCTV had already spent considerable time criticizing the harm of AI “Classic of Mountains and Seas,” and netizens below were arguing fiercely. The reason is that people have never had a clear standard for what’s acceptable.

So, does AI remixing really need to be cleaned up?

If all creators and viewers clearly understood the creative intent of the original works — at least knew what the adapted works originally talked about — then there wouldn’t be such a need for a big campaign.

But the key is that AI technology has now surpassed public cognition; some classic works are becoming unrecognizable under AI processing. Remember, even those street-stall literatures that distorted Romance of the Three Kingdoms had huge audiences. The 2010 TV series Three Kingdoms even spawned a completely fictional historical entry “Baimen Gate” on Baidu Baike. So what about now?

Regarding the special campaign, public opinion has always been hard to unify. After all, we’ve always believed that creation should be free, not dancing in chains.

But even so, that doesn’t mean AI remixing can do whatever it wants.

As a regulator, the NRTA does need to make creators understand the boundaries. Just like with the regulation of “guichu” content in 2018: after the anti-vulgarity cleanup back then, the guichu zone on Bilibili didn’t wither — instead, it gave birth to recognized classics like Poetry King.

So, what impact will AI remixing governance actually have on everyone? Let’s not jump to conclusions — let the bullets fly for a while.