Youku President Wu Qian: Embrace AI, but AI Can't Replace Real Actors

AI is rewriting the whole pipeline

Per IThome (July 17), the "HorsePower AI Video Contest," co-hosted by Alibaba's HappyHorse and Whale TV & Film, launched the "HappyHorse AI Film Bootcamp." Whale COO and Youku president Wu Qian urged creators to embrace AI without blind faith in technology. She noted AI is affecting film at unprecedented speed — from turning ideas into visuals to storyboarding and post-production, work that once needed vast time, budget and teamwork is being rewritten by AI.

But "human warmth" is irreplaceable

On the debate over replacing actors with AI, Wu was clear: AI cannot replace real actors, and Youku will keep cultivating and using them. In her view, a character's complexity, the weight of a silence, the restraint and release within a relationship all come from human understanding; a real actor's value is turning script text into something warm, layered and alive. AI extends creative capacity and lowers barriers — helping validate ideas faster and build worlds more boldly — but can't replace lived experience and emotional insight, nor the real texture an actor conveys through body, gaze and breath.

Toward finely divided human-machine collaboration

Wu argued that the more AI accelerates production, the more the industry must value "people" — a creator's taste, empathy and storytelling intent are what let a work endure; the truly scarce figure in the AI era is the "super creator" who commands both creativity and technology. She sees the future as finely divided human-machine collaboration: let AI raise industrial efficiency while creators and actors keep pricing power over "content premium" — humans for warmth and soul, technology for efficiency and process. Amid AIGC's push into film, it's a composed reference point from the content side.