AI-made short film "Paper Phone" (《纸手机》) goes viral — two creators, three days, a national audience fooled

Viral, made by two people

A two-person Shenzhen WAI Studio (WAI工作室) reportedly used generative AI to produce a short film called "Paper Phone" (《纸手机》) in three days. It has been reported that China Central Television's web portal (CCTV.com/央视网) and People's Daily (人民日报) reposted the piece, and that clips on Douyin (抖音) have surpassed 100 million views. No stars, no location rentals, no professional cast — just prompts and rendering pipelines on a desktop.

The story is simple and emotionally direct: a boy with 15 yuan buys a paper-made phone to "video call" his deceased grandmother, only to receive a carefully made high-end paper phone when his orphan status is revealed. The film's cultural hooks — funeral paper offerings (纸扎), filial piety and grief — are quintessentially Chinese, and they helped the synthetic visuals land with a large mainstream audience.

Ethics, mainstreaming, and what comes next

It has been reported that the director deliberately preserved certain visual artifacts — extra fingers, stiff background movements, odd lighting — so viewers could still detect some human-making. Why? Because the film’s makers feared total indistinguishability. If every imperfection were ironed out, audiences might be fully convinced they had watched real actors. That admission crystallizes a new ethical dilemma: technical overabundance can force creators to "downgrade" realism to preserve trust.

Mainstream reposting by CCTV.com and People's Daily signals that AI-generated content has entered China's core media ecosystem. At the same time, this surge comes amid global debates over deepfakes, disinformation and tighter U.S.-China tech controls. Who verifies authenticity? Who sets boundaries between emotional truth and synthetic deception? Creators will get better at wielding these tools — and at deciding when to leave a telltale bug. Audiences will have to decide whether feeling moved is enough, or whether the provenance of the image now matters as much as the story it tells.