AI Stars Are Inevitable: The Celebrity Industry Is Headed for an Exponential Crash

Was it Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Zhuang Zhou? — Zhuangzi, “On the Equality of Things” (不知周之梦为胡蝶与，胡蝶之梦为周与？)

Let me start with the conclusion:

AI stars are coming, and there’s no stopping them. As AI develops, the celebrity industry will shrink exponentially.

In fact, AI stars are already on their way. Hatsune Miku has been singing for nearly twenty years, and Luo Tianyi has headlined concerts in China. In 2025, an “AI actress” called Tilly Norwood made her debut, and SAG-AFTRA rushed out a statement condemning her.

Zhuangzi woke from his dream unable to tell which one was real. Future audiences will probably feel the same way about what they watch: they won’t be able to tell, and they won’t care.

Here are my eight reasons.

1. Acting More Real Than Real

AI film and video will produce a huge number of AI actors.

A few years ago, AI video was easy to spot: an extra finger, faces melting, a character turning into someone else after two steps. Now the lighting, skin, micro-expressions and emotion in the eyes get more convincing with every generation. It is already hard to tell AI footage from real footage.

A human actor is limited by talent, mood, schedule and age. If they can’t cry today, that’s ten takes. If a thirty-year-old plays an eighteen-year-old, it shows.

AI actors don’t have these problems. They cry on cue, laugh on cue, and the same actor can play eighteen or eighty. Being lifelike is the starting point. Being more real than real is where this ends up.

2. AI Actors Never Have Scandals

As soon as an actor gets famous today, the media start watching them around the clock.

What they ate, who they had dinner with, what time they got home, who they’re dating: every detail of their life ends up under a magnifying glass while paparazzi follow them everywhere. As the Chinese saying goes, who among us is a sage, free of all faults? Watch anyone long enough and you’ll find something. Today it’s tax evasion, tomorrow an affair, the day after that their public image collapses, and a production worth hundreds of millions goes up in smoke.

AI actors have no private life, so there’s nothing to dig up.

They’ll never be photographed walking into someone’s house at midnight, never say the wrong thing at a dinner party, never have a career-ending post from ten years ago. Paparazzi can’t follow them, because once the shoot ends they “don’t exist.”

3. Capital Will Pay for AI

The third point follows from the second: investors will put their money into AI actors.

The reason is stability.

A badly made film is not what investors fear most. What they fear is a finished film that can never be released. If the lead actor gets into trouble, the whole production gets shelved and everyone’s work is wasted.

An AI actor:

Won’t get into trouble: no private life means no scandals;
Is 100% controllable: it performs exactly as the script says;
Won’t act like a diva: never late, never on strike, never demanding rewrites or top billing, never showing up with a dozen assistants.

To investors, that’s the perfect employee. Business chases profit; it always has. Stability is a form of productivity.

4. Put It in a Robot Shell and Meet the Fans

Some will say an AI star, however popular, can only live on a screen, so fans never get to meet them in person.

But robots are improving too.

Humanoid robots have advanced quickly in the last few years. Running, jumping, backflips, housework: they keep hitting new milestones. In the future, all you’d need to do is put the AI actor’s “skin” (its look, voice, personality and memories) onto a robot, and it could walk right off the screen to meet fans in person, sign autographs, pose for photos and chat.

It won’t get tired, either. A human star’s hand gives out after three hours of signing. A robot could sign until the last fan leaves, chat with every one of them, and remember who each person is.

5. Absurdly Cheap

Where does the money go on a traditional drama?

Hiring actors, renting equipment, renting locations, building sets, hiring extras, and feeding, housing and moving a crew of hundreds. Every item costs real money.

An AI short drama costs far less to produce than a traditionally shot series. No locations to rent, because the scenes are generated. No waiting on schedules, because the actors are always available. No sets to build: an ancient palace or an alien base is one prompt away.

“Twice the result for half the effort” isn’t an exaggeration here. It’s literally what happens.

6. Sell It, License It, Open-Source It: Fame at Light Speed

There’s only one of each human actor. Once they sign with one studio, they can’t work for another.

AI actors are different. They can be sold, licensed, even open-sourced.

Once an actor is open-sourced, creators all over the world can use it. Today it shows up in a sci-fi short, tomorrow in a music video, the day after in some student’s graduation project. Word spreads from person to person, and its fame grows at a speed no ordinary actor could ever match.

Hatsune Miku is the best example. Her owners let fans create freely within a set of rules, and the result was countless fan-made songs, videos and drawings that turned a “virtual singer” into a global idol.

A hard-working human actor makes two or three productions a year. An AI actor can appear in a thousand productions on the same day.

7. Fluent in Every Language

How hard is it for a Chinese actor to become famous internationally?

Language is the first wall. Lines get dubbed and lose the feel of the original voice. Speaking a foreign language yourself brings accents and lip movements that don’t match.

An AI actor can speak most of the world’s languages with perfect pronunciation and accurate lip sync. The same production can launch in Chinese, English, Spanish and Japanese at once, and every version sounds like the original.

Once language stops being a wall, international fame comes naturally.

8. Crossing Between Worlds, and Finally, Someone Who Can Act Football

This is the point I find most interesting.

AI actors can be updated quickly and can move between fictional worlds.

Once an AI actor is fully open-sourced, ordinary people can drop it into all kinds of productions. The lead of a sci-fi series could cross over into another production’s magical world. A wuxia hero could turn up on the streets of a cyberpunk city. This used to be fan fiction, limited to text and drawings. In the future it could be filmed.

Here’s another example: why are there so few football films and dramas?

Because most actors can’t play football.

The best moments in football (a curling shot, a knock-and-run past a defender, a bicycle kick) are beyond ordinary actors. Directors cover for it with heavy editing and close-ups: a quick shot of a foot touching the ball, cut; the ball hits the net, cut; a close-up of the actor celebrating, cut. Audiences can tell, and directors hate shooting it that way.

AI actors are different. Import a footballer’s movements, and the AI actor can reproduce that player’s motion and expressions one-to-one. Off-the-ball runs, first touch, shooting technique, goal celebrations: everything can be recreated faithfully.

Why was the Japanese football anime Blue Lock such a hit a few years ago? I think a big reason is that it filled a gap: no real actor can currently perform what happens on the pitch. So it had to be drawn.

AI actors can fill that gap. Whatever animation can do, they can do too, and they can add the realism that animation can’t.

A Reality Check: The Obstacles Ahead

There are two sides to everything, though. Here are the objections I think people will raise:

1. Are AI actors really scandal-proof?

The actor itself won’t cause one, but the company behind it might. In 2022, Carol (珈乐), a member of the virtual idol group A-SOUL, went on indefinite “hiatus”, and the scandal behind it was about how the human performer behind the avatar had been treated. An AI actor won’t cheat or evade taxes, but its operator can get into trouble, its training data can face copyright disputes, and once open-sourced it can be used for harmful content. The person can’t fall from grace anymore, but the house built around them still can.

2. Open source and “100% controllable” contradict each other.

Investors want exclusivity and control. Open source means anyone can use the actor and change it. These will probably become two separate paths: “commercial AI stars” held tightly by companies and earning money through stability, and “open-source AI stars” handed to the community that, like Miku, become famous by spreading.

3. Legally, the risk isn’t the movement. It’s being recognized.

Nobody owns a movement. Pulling off a move on the pitch doesn’t give you the right to stop anyone else from doing it. Anyone can do a Cruyff turn or a Marseille roulette, and no move is patented. Importing a player’s movements into an AI actor isn’t infringement in itself. Whoever makes the claim has to prove it, and showing that an AI actor copied your movements rather than anyone else’s is close to impossible.

There’s only one thing to watch out for: don’t use a real person as raw material. Feeding a star’s photos or body measurements into the AI to generate the actor, or using their name in your marketing, runs into likeness and name rights. Resembling someone is a different matter. Generate tens of thousands of AI faces and a few will look like some footballer; cast a lookalike, and it’s still their own face. Looking like someone isn’t the same as being them. Where the motion data comes from isn’t a problem at all. Just tell the AI in plain language to “do a Marseille roulette”, or build the animation yourself in Blender, and the data is entirely your own.

US courts have also ruled that purely AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted. If an AI star doesn’t contain enough human creative work, someone could clone it and you might have no legal recourse.

4. Sometimes what fans love is exactly the realness.

Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, yet more people watch humans play chess today than ever before. Many fans follow a star to watch a real person rise from nobody to the top: their struggle, their growth, their flaws. AI can’t offer that, at least not in the same way.

So, to put it more precisely, here’s what I think will happen:

The celebrity industry will shrink exponentially in numbers. Large numbers of supporting actors, extras, stunt doubles and short-drama actors will be replaced by AI, and the few top human stars left will become even rarer. It’s like what happened once machine-woven cloth became common: handmade goods turned into a luxury.

What crashes is the industry’s total number of jobs, not every single career.

Looking Further Ahead: A Thousand Colors of Spring

Once you have felt the face of the east wind, you know spring is a thousand shades of red and purple. — Zhu Xi, “Spring Day” (等闲识得东风面，万紫千红总是春)

Once AI stars are everywhere, I think human entertainment will become incredibly rich and varied.

First, someone will finish the shows that fell apart.

Plenty of films and series leave most of their audience unhappy, and in the past all you could do was complain and accept it. After Game of Thrones ended in 2019, more than a million people signed a petition demanding a remake of season eight. Nothing came of it, of course.

In the future, nobody will need to petition. If you don’t like the official ending, some creator will pick up the original story and continue it, or simply write a new ending. You can’t please everyone, so let everyone make their own version.

Second, fandoms will get smaller, and there will be far more of them.

Look at how stardom has changed:

In the past: there were few stars, the whole country knew the same handful, and families watched the same TV gala together;
Today: there are many more stars, but most of them belong to young people. Step into a different age group and you might not recognize a single one;
In the future: every group will have idols of its own.

Some will ask: a large fandom paying one company is far more profitable than small fandoms spread across many companies, so why would investors serve small circles?

The answer, again, is cost. Making an idol used to mean auditions, training, styling and a huge marketing budget, and without millions of fans you’d never earn it back. Once AI pushes the cost of an idol close to zero, a circle of a few thousand fans is enough to sustain an idol made just for them. Business that wasn’t worth doing before becomes worth doing.

Take this far enough and everyone ends up with a set of idols that fits their taste exactly. As the Chinese saying goes, each flower pleases its own beholder.

There’s a downside, of course. If everyone only watches the idols they like, people will share fewer and fewer topics, and filter bubbles will thicken. A few superstars that everyone knows will probably survive, because people still need something to talk about together. The final shape may be large at both ends and hollow in the middle: a tiny number of superstars at the top, countless small circles at the bottom, and the “somewhat famous” stars in between squeezed hardest.

Who Will Make the Stars: Traditional Studios vs AI Companies

When a road reaches its end, change; with change comes a way through; with a way through comes endurance. — Book of Changes, “Great Commentary” (穷则变，变则通，通则久)

So who will make AI stars? That raises two questions: will traditional companies transform, and how will AI companies compete with them?

Traditional companies have capital and copyright. They hold decades of IP and mature distribution channels, and they have the money to hire all kinds of talent to make AI films directly. But the moat that copyright provides is narrower than people think.

Copyright protects expression, not ideas. Rebirth, revenge, underdog-rises stories: anyone can use them. I could make an original drama whose plot closely resembles an older one, with every actor replaced by AI, and legally that would be very hard to pin down. There are limits, of course. When Chiung Yao sued Yu Zheng, the court found that Palace 3 had copied the plot structure of Plum Blossom Scar, and the damages came to five million yuan. A similar overall direction is fine; copying a whole chain of specific plot points crosses the line.

So copyright is only valuable if the show is worth buying in the first place. What still holds up are the names, characters and brands audiences recognize: you can make a very similar story, but you can’t give it that name. Everything else will be freely “borrowed” in the AI era.

AI companies have enormous freedom and creativity. They carry no legacy baggage, no star contracts, no old business to protect. They can try anything, and a small boat turns quickly.

Traditional companies are already playing both sides. In 2025, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for infringement, while Disney also invested in OpenAI and licensed more than two hundred of its characters for use in Sora. If you can’t beat them, join them.

But a traditional company’s greatest enemy is often itself. A Kodak engineer invented the digital camera in 1975, yet Kodak couldn’t bring itself to give up its film business, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The more you hold, the harder it is to let go. Asking companies that live off human stars, studios and film crews to disrupt themselves is close to impossible.

My view: traditional companies that transform will remain major powers thanks to their brands and capital. Those that refuse will live off their past, licensing out old copyrights again and again until the well runs dry, and repeat Kodak’s mistake. And once AI companies create AI stars of their own, they’ll own IP too, and the line between the two will keep blurring.

Don’t forget the third force: the countless individual creators from the previous section. The big companies will fight over the top; individual creators will hold the small circles.

When the road ends, change, and change opens a way through. Those who can’t turn will simply be left behind by their era.

Closing: The Swallows of the Wang and Xie Halls

The swallows that once nested in the halls of the noble Wang and Xie families now fly into the homes of ordinary people. — Liu Yuxi, “Black Robe Lane” (旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家)

Stars used to be scarce. Who you could cast depended on how much money you had and who you knew. Stars were the swallows in the halls of noble families, and ordinary people could only watch from afar.

AI stars will change all of that.

When an AI actor can be open-sourced, licensed and brought into anyone’s work, stars fly into ordinary homes. A student, an independent creator, a fan who just wants to make a football film can all have their own A-lister.

As the Chinese saying goes, the waves behind the Yangtze push the ones ahead. This time, the next wave might not be human.