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Entertainment and Music: The "Youth Xiangtan · Bubugao Night" concert, produced by Hunan Satellite TV (湖南卫视) and simulcast on Mango TV (芒果TV) at the Xiangtan Sports Center on 30 May 2026, was built around an AI-technology stage and a "Xiangtan-limited AI avatar" (AI分身) concept. Singer Bibi Zhou (周笔畅) performed "Use All of Me to Run Toward You" together with her own AI avatar, which ran out onto the stage to interact with her across space. In a companion AI roaming drama titled "Thousands of Mountains and Rivers" (万水千山), an AI avatar of singer Hailai Amu (海来阿木) traveled through time across five Xiangtan landmarks—Zhaoshan, the Xiangjiang "Smile Curve" bend, a Qi Baishi ink painting, the 1,700-year-old Yaowan district, and Wanlou tower—to gather the city's treasures and awaken his musical energy before his live set. Separately, Yuehua Entertainment (乐华娱乐) sustained its long-running virtual-being strategy: founder and CEO Du Hua, who has shown consistent interest in virtual humans, launched her own virtual image "Huahuazi" (华华子) and, at a 29 January "Entrepreneurs' Night," positioned 2026 as the company's transformation year toward becoming a "robot + AI + designer-toy" technology-entertainment company. The Huahuazi avatar was cloned by the Beijing firm Fengping Intelligence (风平智能), and the label previously ran the motion-capture virtual idol group A-SOUL. In March 2026 Yuehua debuted HeyDream, billed as Asia's first "AI-driven real-person girl group," using a real-person-face plus full-process AI production technique, a move treated as a milestone for domestic AI idols.

Marketing and Content Creation: Baidu (百度) operates Huiboxing (慧播星), presented as the industry's first full-stack AI digital-human livestreaming solution, which lowers the barrier to live commerce by letting merchants complete a digital-human livestream in as few as three steps. Built on the Ernie large model, its one-click cloning feature reproduces a person's voice, image, and livestream-room decoration from a roughly three-minute video, with lip-sync technology supporting wide side-turns and handheld product demonstrations. The same digital-human capability was credited in promotional video work tied to the drama "The Little Alley Family 2" (小巷人家2). ByteDance (字节跳动) offers a competing tool through its Ocean Engine "Jichuang" (即创) AIGC platform; its digital-human finished-video capability lets businesses generate realistic presenters, with users producing more than 400,000 AIGC assets daily and advanced merchants commissioning private bespoke digital humans. At the municipal level, Shanghai's newly launched "Bund Creation Festival" (外滩创作节) spotlighted ordinary creators using digital humans to build English-language accounts that gained tens of thousands of followers within three months, and in Guiyang the cross-border e-commerce firm Guizhou Lingquan Cross-border Supply Chain Management (贵州领圈跨境供应链管理服务有限公司) reported developing "smart mixed-cut" and "digital-human cloning" features for solo overseas sellers.

Enterprise, Customer Service, and Technical Standards: iFlytek (科大讯飞) announced that its AI Virtual Human Interaction Platform was the first in China to pass full-function conformance testing for the national standard GB/T 46483-2025 on customer-service virtual digital humans. The evaluation by the China Electronics Standardization Institute covered 2D and 3D image generation and driving, visual and voice capture and wake-up, speech recognition, semantic understanding, speech synthesis, knowledge management, and emotion capture, recognition, decision-making and expression. Built on the company's Spark large model, the platform spans products including mobile digital humans, smart interaction machines, the iFlytek Smart Production tool, and a PC-side virtual-human assistant, and serves clients such as the Open University of China (国家开放大学), China Southern Power Grid (南方电网), Ping An (中国平安), Xinhua News Agency (新华社), and CCTV.com (央视网). Its digital human "Xiaofei" can listen and see, retain conversational history, distinguish whether it is being addressed in a multi-party setting, converse in foreign languages, and assume personas such as the literary figure Lin Daiyu; the company also led two ITU-T digital-human international standards. Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) filed a patent for a digital-human control method (publication number CN122120528A, filed November 2024) intended to make digital-human state transitions more natural and fluid, complementing its existing virtual digital-human open platform offered as a PaaS and SaaS solution for retail, government, finance, telecom, and media scenarios. Tianditech (天地在线) clarified, following abnormal stock movement, that its digital-human, digital-content, and VR large-space virtual content services remain at an early development stage with minimal revenue, while internet advertising placement and agency operations made up 90.5% of its 2025 main-business revenue. In the southwest, Chongqing Huijingxuan Network Technology (重庆汇景宣网络科技有限公司) markets AI digital-human narration within a "digital content plus smart hardware" model that also spans VR panoramic shooting and drone aerial photography in the smart-robot rental market.

Cultural Heritage and Tourism: A "Digital Human Li Bai" (数字人李白) created with AIGC technology was formally unveiled in Ma'anshan, Anhui, on 29 May 2026 at the results showcase of the "AIGC Digital Human Li Bai Application Competition," themed "AI Imagining Poetic Ma'anshan." The national youth competition is hosted by the Huashan District People's Government of Ma'anshan (马鞍山市花山区人民政府), organized by CTV Media (中视传媒), and supported by the national research society for computer-based education in higher institutions, focusing on digital-human technology, AIGC content generation, intelligent interaction, and digital storytelling to fuse AI with traditional culture for cultural communication, the digital-content industry, and cultural-tourism commercialization. Its five tracks cover contemporary Li Bai character design, an original animated story pairing a young Li Bai with a panda, AI cultural-tourism scene applications, AIGC cultural-creative product design and marketing, and public co-created short videos, supported by a district incubation fund to commercialize the resulting cultural IP. In Heilongjiang, the Wanjuan Pavilion ancient-books digital exhibition hall in Qiqihar opened to the public using three-screen linkage, AR modeling, and digital humans to present its collections.

Public Sector and Civic Services: Several provincial initiatives placed digital humans in civic-facing roles. The 2026 Shaanxi Citizen Science Quality Competition (陕西省公民科学素质大赛), launched in Xi'an, deployed a digital human alongside intelligent science-popularization analysis and a virtual-image creative dress-up feature to engage target groups including youth, farmers, industrial workers, the elderly, and civil servants. In Nanjing, a digital human named "Caibao" (财宝) provided on-site interaction as the Nanjing Finance Vocational College (南京财经高职校) presented at a regional science-and-innovation exhibition, while Jiangsu's highway sector demonstrated a "three-person collaboration" unmanned-construction model that pairs remote human operators with a digital human. In Shenyang, the city's 19th Xiyuan Queqiao matchmaking event introduced an AI matchmaker (AI红娘) jointly developed by Liaoning Beidou Cloud Digital Technology (辽宁北斗云数字科技有限公司) and Shenyang Medical College (沈阳医学院), described as an assistant-type digital human providing cloud-based services with a gentle and professional manner.

Industry Developments and Ethical Debates: At the opening of the "2026 National AI Agent Innovation and Development Competition" and Hubei's first AI ecosystem innovation conference in Wuhan on 28 May 2026, an AI digital human called "the Leaper" (跃迁者) joined five human guests on a roundtable hosted by Wuhan Modal Leap Technology (武汉模态跃迁科技有限公司) co-founder and COO Chang Yuanhe, discussing technology iteration, industry penetration, and computing-power supply around open-source large models. Industry measurement continued through the China Digital Human Influence Index Report compiled by the Communication University of China (中国传媒大学); the report ranks the sector across three core categories—virtual idols known for IP operation, virtual anchors transforming under policy norms, and industry-empowering digital employees—drawing on multi-platform data collection, expert scoring, and user voting, with charted virtual idols including Luo Tianyi (洛天依), Liu Yexi (柳夜熙), and Xingtong (星瞳). On the cautionary side, Shen Honggang, an official of the screenwriting committee under the China Television Drama Production Industry Association (中国电视剧制作产业协会), argued that although AI has penetrated film and television from scriptwriting, storyboarding, and intelligent editing through to digital humans, with short-form drama emerging as a new frontier, it cannot replace core human creativity. Cost was cited as a continuing constraint in the same period, with hyper-realistic virtual-human rendering estimated at roughly 8,000 to 15,000 yuan per second and a fifteen-second clip reaching production costs in the millions of yuan.