It was an afternoon in 2023 that Peng Qingyun remembers clearly. HR called him into the conference room and handed him a termination agreement. "Because of AI, your department is being optimized," they said.
As a brand visual designer with years of experience, Peng had watched tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion go from curiosity to production-ready in mere months. What used to take him three hours to create — a finished illustration, a marketing visual — AI could generate in under three minutes. He sent out hundreds of resumes that year. Most went unanswered. "Traditional design will never go back to the way it was," he later told reporters.
Instead of giving up, Peng made a decision: he would fully embrace the technology that had displaced him. He joined the WaytoAGI open-source community and started practicing every day — text generation, storyboarding, voice synthesis. Each comment thread became his personal workshop. What he discovered changed his perspective entirely: his core skills — creativity, aesthetic judgment, visual design — weren't wasted. They were just being amplified by new tools.
In 2024, he began experimenting with AI short dramas. The following year, he co-created "War of the Gods" (众神之战), a mythological AI short drama that achieved nearly 20 million views on major Chinese short drama platforms and was exported to Singapore, France, and other markets. It was nominated for multiple awards including the 2025 China Radio and Television Federation's Top 10 AI Short Dramas.
Client work started coming to him unsolicited.
In January 2026, at age 34, Peng founded Hangzhou Xingjing Engine Technology Co., Ltd. The team is just two people — Peng handles technology and content generation, while his partner handles business development. Their main services: AI short drama production, AI video narration, and AI literacy training.
The economics are striking. "War of the Gods" cost only 100,000 yuan (about $14,000) and took three months to produce four episodes totaling 22 minutes. Traditional production of the same scale would take at least a year and require teams for lighting, makeup, and post-production. With two dramas produced per month, each team member generates monthly revenue in the tens of thousands of yuan.
"Before, I received task assignments in an open office. Now I control the entire project workflow from a small booth. It's tiring, but it's control," Peng said in an interview.
His core insight, one he shares through the OPC (One-Person Company) alliance he helps organize, is simple: find your leverage point — the thing you're genuinely better at than others — then use AI to multiply it 10x. Don't let AI do your job for you; make AI expand what your job can be.