What Makes Tencent, ByteDance, TapTap... All Jump In, Using AI to Rewrite UGC's "Underlying Code

​Not long ago, WeChat was quietly beta-testing a mini-program called “Shangtouwa”. It requires no standalone app, and its operation is extremely simple: users type in a “brainwave”, and AI generates in real time a short interactive story with branching paths that can be shared with a single tap.

Notably, besides pure-text content, “Shangtouwa” also has an AVG channel, similar to a lightweight vertical-screen interactive text game, complete with AI-generated CG, simple scene art, UI interfaces, voice acting, and other assets. However, this relatively more complex content is published by the product operations team, and the creation port has not yet been opened to ordinary players.

Viewed longitudinally, this brings to mind early Chengguang, Yiciyuan, and even LOFTER — platforms where UGC-led “story” creation and social entertainment thrived. Viewed horizontally, it also forms an interesting echo with equally AI-driven products such as Maoxiang and Xingye, and even overseas products like AI Dungeon.

This very connection means that the arrival of AI is now driving a profound iteration of the social entertainment model of the past decade — a model mainly built on “content creation and distribution”.

It is more than just “Shangtouwa”. Tencent's “Yuanbao Pai” and TapTap Maker have also recently surfaced… Despite their different backgrounds and paths, gaming and social giants and upstarts alike are, almost in unison, channeling strategic resources in the same direction: competing for the power of definition and discourse over the future AI entertainment paradigm of “human-content interaction”.

This is no coincidence. The AI-driven transformation of content social entertainment is moving from technical demonstrations and early experiments into a full-fledged stage of large-scale, ecosystem-level “positional warfare”.

New entrants are all trying to prove: when AI can revolutionize the production efficiency and creative methods of content and interaction design, and generate interactive experiences in real time, the power of creation, the motivation for consumption, and even the bonds of sociality will all be rewritten.

An old saying goes: all that is solid melts into air. In this great era of AI-led transformation, the very opposite is true — all that is fluid is becoming the cornerstone.

Before the all-out, white-hot competition over multidimensional capabilities — IP, traffic, operations, and more — in AI content social entertainment even gets underway, what opens first is a contest over, and redistribution of, the “right to create”.

The past decade was a period in which UGC profoundly shaped content entertainment and social interaction.

Its main line of development was the “limited delegation of the right to create”. Platforms provided the tools and the town square, while users contributed ideas, talent, and time. The strategic core of almost every platform was to design a set of rules that could unleash users' creativity and generate community and traffic effects. And because the key links they controlled in the creative process differed, the dividends each platform reaped in the UGC era also had different emphases.

Take the beneficiaries of the “tool + community” dividend, represented by Chengguang and Yiciyuan. By providing easy-to-use AVG creation tools, they lowered the barrier to telling stories through multi-branch, interactive narratives, giving rise to the UGC ecosystem and cultural circle of “text games”. Because they occupied the source of a specific creative form, they gathered a group of users who had both the desire to create and the need to consume narratives.

LOFTER, on the other hand, reaped the dividend of “deep circle culture”. In its early days, it used its TAG system to efficiently organize fan creation and interest-based social interaction, forming strong cultural cohesion within circles. LOFTER built a social entertainment arena grounded in doujin culture, where the social currency circulating on the platform was shared affection for IPs and creativity.

Besides the video dividend, Bilibili was also the culmination of the UGC era's “self-sustaining circular ecosystem”. It extended UGC from text-and-images to video and built a moat through danmaku culture and community atmosphere, ultimately becoming the entertainment gateway of a generation.

The dividend of IP industrialization and emotion-driven spending, meanwhile, is represented by leading anime-style mobile games and otome games. They pushed UGC into a new stage: the platform itself becomes a powerful IP and content source, building an internal, active user ecosystem through sustained, high-quality content output. UGC keeps growing outside the game and continuously feeds back into — and influences — the development of the game itself. Around such games, a self-sufficient cultural field has formed.

But by now, the bottlenecks in some of these models have become obvious.

For example, no matter how widespread UGC becomes, the right to create still ultimately flows to the top. The vast majority of users remain consumers of UGC content rather than true participants, and this can easily solidify into a “looking up” from content consumers to creators. Similarly, community atmosphere is the soul, but it can also easily “degenerate” under the influence of traffic and commercialization.

As a result, many traditional content social entertainment platforms are forced into a choice: break out of their circles and go broad, in order to accommodate a wider range of users and content needs; or go deep into their existing circles, maintaining tone and purity within a relatively limited scale. Each path, in turn, brings its own distinct challenges.

AI's entry did not begin as a frontal assault on past models. Instead, it started from the “right to create” at the core of the old system, launching a two-pronged deconstruction. The participants include both the upstarts of the AI era, such as Minimax, and the giants of the previous generation of content social entertainment, such as Tencent and ByteDance.

On one front, what is being deconstructed is “character consumption” — that is, the shift from loving the preset character to co-creating a relationship.

From early UGC communities to anime-style games and otome games, user content consumption and entertainment behavior show a clear “character consumption” pattern, namely the emotional and resource investment centered on characters. This includes fan re-creations of characters, as well as business models that evolved to encompass gacha pulls, character progression, and the merch economy. And thanks to technological evolution, character presentation, emotional simulation, and immersive experiences have all been delivering increasingly intense feedback.

But AI-native character companion communities — such as Minimax's Xingye, ByteDance's Maoxiang, and Zhumengdao, which was incubated early on within China Literature's web-novel ecosystem — are rewriting many of those traditional logics.

Their cores are fairly consistent: all are driven by large language models, offering emotionally engaging character dialogue experiences. The core functions all revolve around AI characters. Users can interact with preset characters (for example, the protagonist of a certain IP), and they can also create their own characters by customizing faces, setting personalities, backgrounds, and dialogue examples, and then share them with others. In terms of business models, they mostly adopt subscription plans and item-based payments, providing users with deeper dialogue, creation, and priority access privileges.

These products differ in content form and community complexity. For example, Zhumengdao leans more toward lightweight text conversations, Maoxiang has richer visual presentation, and Xingye has expanded into features such as “Custom FM”, while also spawning interest communities where topics like merch and OCs can be discussed. But in essence, they all enter through character companionship and emotional consumption, using AI conversation as the traffic gateway and core interaction to build interest communities for the AI era.

Although none of these products has truly broken out of its niche, they have, to a certain extent, partially handed the power to define relationships — from the scripts of official writers to each conversational interaction of users, validating that users are willing to form emotional bonds with an AI-driven “persona”. The center of gravity of the emotional economy, in fact, is shifting further from static “possession” to dynamic “cultivation”.

On the other front, what is being deconstructed is “narrative consumption” — users move from experiencing stories to directing them.

The representative here is an AI-native interactive narrative platform like “Shangtouwa”. It lives in the form of a mini-program and is easy to share. The thresholds for both creation and content consumption are relatively low: type a few sentences, and an interactive script with branching options is generated automatically. Similar to a “plaza” for interactive stories, it aggregates interactive content derived from various IPs and trending topics within interest circles. Users can experience it themselves, or share it to the plaza to find kindred spirits.

Here, the user's core ability is no longer “writing skills”, but the ability to propose high-concept ideas. User enjoyment will come more from validating ideas and expressing aesthetics, which makes users no longer “creators” in the traditional sense, but more like “curators” of creativity.

​Ecosystem-Level Players Enter the Arena, Platform Core Value Is Reshaped

When AI begins to deconstruct the most basic units of consumption — characters and stories — an opportunity bigger than any single-point product also emerges: reshaping the platform itself. And this inevitably elevates the competition to the ecosystem level.

Previously, the moves by AI technology companies and internet giants in the field of AI content social entertainment were still mainly about naturally extending and landing their core strategic capabilities into consumer-side entertainment scenarios.

For example, “Xingye” is Minimax's concrete investment of its AI Agent capabilities in consumer-side scenarios; “Maoxiang” is another attempt by the “app factory” ByteDance to integrate AI technology with the new entertainment forms and traffic gateways of young people; and “Shangtouwa” reflects Tencent's exploration of replicating the “mini-game” logic within the WeChat ecosystem and positioning lightweight interactive content.

The big players combine their technological, ecosystem, and traffic advantages with the scenario needs of AI content social entertainment. The corresponding products are, in all likelihood, transitional forms in the process of industrial development. However, just like the many transitional apps of the early smartphone era, which ultimately did not become the mainstream form but defined the interaction logic and product thinking of the entire mobile internet, although they may not end up as the final form, they have left their mark on how the whole industry thinks.

In the last few days, the emergence of TapTap Maker and Yuanbao Pai reflects that AI content social entertainment has taken another step from its early vertical domains toward a more comprehensive entertainment and social ecosystem.

The former represents a direction that uses AI to make the fusion of “UGC + gamification + social” lighter and more agile, creating a low entry threshold that fits the entertainment needs of the new generation of young people.

TapTap Maker is positioned as a “zero-threshold game creation agent built for game lovers”. Users can have AI create games through natural language, and publish the finished game to the TapTap community with one tap. This will directly change the underlying ecosystem of TapTap, which was originally a community of game players.

Ordinary game players become the source of game creativity, while TapTap evolves from a platform centered on game distribution and player interaction into a composite game ecosystem integrating game experience, creative sharing, and community co-construction.

The latter, meanwhile, is a new AI social play launched by Yuanbao. At Tencent's staff meeting earlier this year, Pony Ma specifically called out “Yuanbao Pai”, explaining that the play was launched to explore the deep integration of AI technology in multiplayer social scenarios, creating a “social space” where AI and user groups can entertain and collaborate together. In this ecosystem, it has also integrated content such as QQ Music and Tencent Video.

In the past, Tencent integrated this kind of content into the game Party Star. Now, “Yuanbao Pai” offers a more open entry point with a lower threshold for users.

Both of these also reveal a key dimension of AI content social entertainment at the current stage: whether to choose a vertical field and use AI to thoroughly restructure its production relations, or to rely on a vast ecosystem and turn the AI experience into a native form of social penetration.

And the common question is: when AI makes the threshold of “creation” itself very low, how should the value of content assets be realized? What core value should platforms seize?

From the “traditional UGC + community” model to the AI-driven new-generation UGC creation and social paradigm, scarce factors of production are shifting further — from technology, time, and the like — to taste, imagination, and the wisdom to issue key prompts and guide AI collaboration.

Early products such as Xingye and Maoxiang have, to a certain degree, proven that a market exists where AI carries emotion and companionship. The current form of “Shangtouwa” is validating the feasibility of an AI-generated interactive narrative paradigm. And the entry of TapTap Maker and “Yuanbao Pai” is beginning, in the open, to probe the boundaries of the rules of next-generation AI content social entertainment.

In the UGC era, for example, sociality revolved around “who created what”, including the re-creation and reinterpretation of IPs. Community prosperity depended on the personal talent and style of creators, and users formed connections because they appreciated the same works or authors.

In the AI era, sociality is more likely to revolve around “shared experiences or creations”. Whether it is generating multiple storyline branches after interacting with the same AI character, or each person generating their own plot and sharing different directions, the core of sociality shifts from looking up to creators to sharing personalized experience journeys. This will constitute the new “decentralized” ecosystem of the AI content social entertainment era.

Ultimately, AI-native content social entertainment products are not just providing new tools; they are building a new content logic that rests on user creativity, uses AIGC as the core interaction engine, and treats personalized experience as social currency. This is a fundamental change from the previous generation of UGC products.

What remains unchanged, however, is that the underlying logic — creating out of a love of sharing and a pursuit of resonance — will not die out. Only the scenarios and forms that carry it are being drastically reshaped as the times and industries change.

Therefore, the “old order” has not entirely failed, nor will it be simply replaced. What we are more likely to see in the future is a certain integration into, and coexistence with, the new world.