An actress has sued the operator of a short drama platform, its parent company and an individual over a synthetic face. The case is small. The economics it exposes are not.
The filing
Zanilia Zhao filed a portrait rights claim in the Mentougou District People’s Court in Beijing against Beijing Bimo Liuxiang Technology, its wholly owned shareholder Beijing Douyin Information Service, and a private individual. The hearing was held by video link on 10 November and no judgment has been issued.
The claim is that certain dramas on the Hongguo platform used face swapping and face merging to place her features on characters without permission, and in some cases used her likeness directly as cover art to draw traffic. Hongguo is owned within the Douyin group.
Not the first time
Several other performers have pursued or publicly warned the same platform over similar content, including Yi Yangqianxi, Yang Zi, Xiao Zhan, Cheng Yi and Deng Wei. The platform’s customer service has responded that AI short drama is a new format and that content review may be incomplete.
That statement is more honest than it sounds. Merging a celebrity face into a frame costs almost nothing. Comparing every frame of every uploaded episode against a database of protected faces costs a great deal, and the cost scales with volume rather than with revenue. Asking a platform to perform substantive portrait review on every frame is not an engineering problem, it is an economic impossibility at current prices.
Where this actually gets decided
Hongguo ran two governance rounds in April 2026, which tells you the platform knows the exposure is real. What it has not solved is the liability question. If a synthetic face is generated by an uploader, the platform hosts it, and the platform earns from the traffic, who pays when the likeness is wrong?
The most likely outcome is not a technological fix but a procedural one: certified likeness registries, mandatory labelling of synthetic performers, and a notice and takedown regime fast enough to be worth using. All of those shift cost back to the platform, which is why the platform will resist them until a court orders otherwise.
China has already written rules on deep synthesis and on labelling AI generated content. What this case tests is whether those rules have a price attached.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu Tech report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.sohu.com/a/1100965063_110683.