This is not a cold fable about 'replacement', but a scorching tale of 'expansion'.

Written by | Oneway Business Jianfan

At the beginning of 2026, in a film mixing studio, Wang Wenkai stared at a black sports car on the screen. This Mercedes-AMG GTXX concept car was racing around the Earth in data form. It didn't exist—no physical model, no live-action footage, everything generated by AI. In the past, such a request would have been considered a fantasy; now, Wang's team was among the few pioneers capable of delivering a 'standard answer'.

At almost the same moment, former tech media professional Wang Boyuan was at home in Xi'an, staring at another screen. In the Chinese-language Dolby music app 'Panoramic New Sound' he had just launched on App Store TestFlight, the performer's avatar was misaligned. He didn't know Swift or Xcode's debugging tools. He simply wrote in the chatbox: 'The performer's avatar isn't aligned with the other results.' As if speaking to a mild-mannered but occasionally errant partner. The other party was an AI programming assistant. After a few rounds of 'conversation', Jay Chou's avatar was neatly aligned with the rest of the page elements.

In Shanghai, content entrepreneur Wang Yiran (online alias 'Turing's Cat') was testing her new product 'Creaibo'. This Bilibili Top 100 UP Master and AI content educator rarely used AI for drafting in the past. 'Because I work on large models, I wasn't satisfied with the content it generated,' she laughed. What she resisted was the overly average, perfect, and 'humanless' text. Now, her team was trying to teach AI to mimic human-specific 'imperfections'—those verbal tics, emotional punctuation, and moments of inspired clumsiness.

Meanwhile, in a Beijing studio, Zhu Xu (online alias 'Zhu Cow and Horse') just received backend data for a video: over 10 million views. In the video, a white cow in a yellow T-shirt sang workplace 'joys and sorrows' with an AI-generated melody and AI-assisted lyrics. Zhu, who claimed to be tone-deaf and never studied music theory, had created an iconic voice in this niche.

These four ordinary people from vastly different backgrounds were collectively experiencing a silent yet intense migration. Their starting points were the Inherent territory (fixed territories) of 'middle age', 'liberal arts students', or 'UP Masters'—places that valued inspiration, aesthetics, narrative, and empathy but had high technical barriers and rigid resource thresholds. Their tools were various surging AIs. Their destination remained shrouded in fog; the only clarity was that old professional boundaries were dissolving beneath their feet, and new possibilities were gushing forth from the cracks.

This is not a cold fable about 'replacement', but a scorching tale of 'expansion'. When AI—this immensely powerful engine—is connected to ordinary people's cockpits, a profound game about who defines life, how to measure value, and where 'humans' belong is intensely unfolding in every minor collaboration. And they are the first explorers searching for paths on the cliffs.

What does 'Ordinary Person + AI' equal? The starting point of migration often blends curiosity, chance, and a hint of coercion.

Before becoming an 'AI director', Wang Wenkai was just an 'ordinary person' in the advertising industry. 'No industry connections, no mentor resources, only able to rely on my work,' he said. 'Advertising is a very exclusionary industry—what they call 'gatekeeping'. It's hard to break in without personal relationships.'

2024 was a low point for Zhu Xu. He had twice attempted entrepreneurship, both ending in failure. 'I was extremely lost at the time.' At that juncture, he suddenly discovered a friend who, using AI, created an outstanding video in just one day. 'This shocked me,' Zhu said. 'I felt this might be a huge opportunity brought by technological iteration.'

He planned to create a workplace-themed animated music account. His friends' initial reaction: 'Are you crazy?' The reason being Zhu neither could draw nor understood music. Yet within a month of launching the AI-powered 'Zhu Cow and Horse' account, the first viral hit emerged, amassing over 10 million views across platforms.

Opportunity similarly came to Wang Wenkai. He described 2025 as an 'explosive year', marked by a qualitative leap in AI tools' 'controllability'. 'Clients never care how much money you spend, but whether you can make them believe you can handle grand scenes,' he said.

'I saw 'intelligence' in these models,' Wang said. You could describe a complex historical scene, and AI would reconstruct it by combining temporal, spatial, and humanistic knowledge. 'From this step, large-scale commercialization became possible.' The automotive, 3C, and luxury brands he served shifted from 'let's try' to 'this is an option'. AI transformed from a 'folk remedy' only recalled when problems couldn't be solved into a standard toolkit option.

For Wang Boyuan, migration began with a 'chatted-up opportunity'. As a seasoned music fan, he manually organized information on thousands of Dolby Atmos tracks into a Notion page. When the data ballooned to the point of webpage lag, he wanted a more professional tool.

A casual mention to Yuanbao yielded 'give it a try' encouragement. From registering a server, deploying the environment, to writing the first line of code, he built a WeChat mini-program in just ten days. Previously, idea realization was limited by typing speed and labor costs; now, AI was the executing hand, while Wang was the core brain.

'It's like a 3D printer,' Wang Boyuan mused. 'In the past, to make a special small part, molding was too expensive, and you couldn't do it yourself. Now, you sketch it, and it prints it for you.' AI didn't just lower 'costs' but 'existential barriers'—enabling the birth of things that couldn't independently exist before.

Wang Yiran's migration resembled a 'reverse charge'. Precisely because she knew the pain points of AI content creation—tools were either 'one-click pre-made dishes (prefab meals)' lacking personality or overly professional and hard to collaborate with—this creator who resisted using AI decided to build her ideal tool. 'Because it didn't exist, we made it.'

It resembled an 'integrated development environment' customized for content creators: input an inspiration, and AI expanded it into a tree-like mind map; then analyzed gains and losses of similar content across the web to assist in building a personalized outline. Upon entering the editor, the true 'dance' began—when the writer paused, AI would 'ghost-complete' the next sentence in gray text, adoptable or rejectable, like a perceptive collaborator.

Creaibo's goal wasn't to replace humans but to become the most creator-understanding 'co-pilot', downgrading AI from 'generator' to 'executor' while preserving 'human touch' at the core of decision-making and aesthetics.

From Wang Wenkai's 'controllability leap', Wang Boyuan's 'demand breakthrough', Zhu Xu's 'cost shock', to Wang Yiran's 'pain-point entrepreneurship', their migrations began at different passes but shared the same driving force: AI was no longer a distant tech spectacle; it had become a detachable, assemblable, and controllable 'engine' directly installed in their personal creative vehicles. With engines roaring and boundaries loosening, a journey into the unknown wilderness commenced.

AI Achieves Technological Equality In a high-end TVC project, Wang Wenkai, the director of photography, and the VFX supervisor held a 'shot breakdown meeting'. They judged that a certain fantastical scene—requiring a full day of 3D rendering for fabric simulation—could instead generate specific assets via AI in minutes. 'Hunyuan excels at generating complex textures like ceramic and glass with high precision, nearly ready for direct use,' he said.

Ultimately, they produced an MV with AI for about 200,000 RMB, with a visual quality the industry generally estimated at 800,000-1,000,000 RMB. 'No one could tell it was AI-made,' Wang recalled. 'People only found the visuals strange and novel.'

Wang Boyuan's collaboration with AI resembled an ongoing table tennis match. He didn't know coding but understood how to propose requirements, while Tencent's AI tool CodeBuddy 'translated' these issues into machine language and attempted solutions. Along the way, Wang learned 'programmer thinking'—modularity, troubleshooting, version control. He even started giving AI 'positive feedback', laughing that he hoped encouragement could have an 'incentive algorithm'.

When he requested the app simulate the 'click' vibration of flipping a physical record while sliding through albums, AI understood and implemented it precisely; when users reported slow loading, AI quickly pinpointed the issue of 'loading three pages of data at once', optimizing the time from 5 seconds to 0.15 seconds.

Zhu Xu's collaborative model resembled a 'gold prospector' and 'ore vein' relationship. He used Yuanbao to generate lyrics, receiving a 'rough draft' of several hundred words each time. His job was to filter, splice, and refine these into the final 300-word, pain point (pain-point)-hitting work.

'AI provides possibilities; humans make choices and refine,' he said. When generating songs, they would 'draw cards' for dozens of versions on Suno, filtering based on 'articulation clarity' and 'tempo speed'.

Wang Yiran's Creaibo attempted to 'productize' this collaborative ethic. They didn't pursue fully automated generation but designed 'companion-style' interaction. AI provided prompts based on the user's writing progress and historical style; users could 'scold AI' like critiquing a subordinate's draft to make it rewrite; AI could also play the role of a 'picky boss', suggesting revisions. 'It's a two-way PUA,' Wang joked, aiming to train AI into the user's 'shadow', assisting rather than replacing.

'If you want AI to truly produce substantive content, you need to provide additional information sources, which requires a knowledge base,' Wang said. 'Tencent Cloud ES's AI search service precisely delivers the relevant information you want to the large model, making the entire process—from inspiration to editing—more efficient.'

What they demonstrated was the possibility of 'super individuals': through deep utilization of AI tools, a single person or small team could cover the lengthy chain from creativity and production to operation and commercialization, reaching nodes that previously required massive organizations to support.

'AI enables many highly complex professions to be implemented with extreme efficiency,' Zhu said. 'This is technological equality.'

What Defines 'Human' After Expansion? Wang Wenkai's studio values 'valuable offense'.

In the VOGUE MAN short film starring Jackson Yee, he front (frontloaded) AI into post-production: using AI to explore styles, preview storyboards, and even design 'imperfections'—like having Yee push a green screen into the frame, later replacing it with various tree forms via the Hunyuan large model; at the end, transforming him into a sculpture retaining the rough 'white model' texture of 3D modeling (3D modeling).

'AI eliminates repetitive labor and rewards autonomous individuals,' Wang said. 'The key is no longer 'who drew it' but 'why it's drawn this way'.' He guarded against becoming a 'textile worker on AI's assembly line', insisting on 'valuable offense'—preserving sharpness and humor.

In Creaibo, users only needed to input past writings, videos, or even chat logs, and AI could learn their tone, verbal tics, and even thought patterns until the continued text 'matched every punctuation and typo'.

'We aim to imbue AI with personality, or rather, co-evolve personality with AI,' Wang said. 'AI is the perfect average, but creation requires 'wok qi'. AI can't create blockbusters.'

Zhu, tone-deaf, uniquely gave him a more universal aesthetic judgment of AI-generated melodies—'first, people must hear the lyrics clearly.' His filtering criteria from countless drafts weren't professional music theory but the shared emotions of millions of office workers. Yuanbao helped him efficiently handle 'word and phrase permutations', but the truly touching 'emotional core' came entirely from his genuine observations as an ordinary office worker.

'What resonates isn't technology but the life we all share behind it,' Zhu said.

Wang Boyuan, through product construction, rediscovered the 'excess value' of his past accumulations. CodeBuddy amplified his 'user-understanding' product thinking rather than mere coding ability. 'AI lets me implement ideas personally (firsthand), but where do ideas come from? From my decade-plus observations of the industry and accumulations of user pain points. Discovering and defining needs is everything's core, and that comes from my brain; code is the projection of ideas. AI's significance lies in more rapidly giving all this physical form.'

Each, in their way, carved out a tech-resistant enclave for human 'imperfection', 'randomness', and 'emotional warmth'.

This might be the migration's deepest revelation: AI expands ability boundaries but forces humans to more clearly define their irreplaceable core. When technological tools become sufficiently powerful and accessible, the core of competitiveness increasingly returns to humans themselves—aesthetics, insights, the angles from which questions are posed, the ability to define value, and that unique 'human touch' hard to program when collaborating with machines.

When asked what kind of person could become the 'AI-native generation', Zhu replied: 'Those who embrace change.'

'Everyone is a newborn in the AI era,' Zhu summarized. 'We all start at the same point. AI lays out 100 paths; whether to walk them, which to choose, and how far to go depends on everyone's choices.'

Their stories mutually illuminate, revealing the same core: AI isn't a distant storm but a readily usable oar. It doesn't automatically steer but lets every ordinary person, based on their passions and accumulations, row to shores previously unreachable.

As Wang Yiran said: 'We must coexist and dance with AI to become better versions of ourselves.'