---
title: "Unique Friends | Senhai (Shi Yuxiang): AI Hasn’t Freed Me—It Has Forced Me to Be More Honest About Who I Am"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research Substack"
originalPublishedAt: "2025-11-16T12:00:43+00:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20251116-01html"
source: "https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20251116-01html"
language: "en"
---

# Unique Friends | Senhai (Shi Yuxiang): AI Hasn’t Freed Me—It Has Forced Me to Be More Honest About Who I Am

_Original · Unique Research · 2025-11-16_

Editorial note: This is a complete English edition of the historical article and its nine interview questions. Career credentials, awards, commercial work and tool-performance claims reflect the source and Senhai’s account, not independently verified current results. “Senhai Fluorescence Studio” translates 森海荧光工作室 rather than asserting an official English business name. Relative time references are retained from the original; its language about exponential visibility and productivity is commentary, not measured growth data.

If you’ve been in the AI creation scene over the past two years, you have probably heard one name: Senhai.

His résumé is easy to remember: former visual director at China Media Group’s CCTV; now an AIGC super creator and founder of “Senhai Fluorescence Studio.”

But if asked to choose his own labels, his self-definition is both simple and willful: childlike wonder intact, contrast, flashes of inspiration.

These three labels almost trace his entire trajectory: he came out of the traditional film and television industry, yet chose to rebuild himself on AI’s most untamed frontier; in an era when efficiency is extolled to the skies, what he talks about most is staying true to himself.

Many people ask him: Has AI finally freed you?

His answer is somewhat unexpected: AI hasn’t freed me; it has bound me tightly to itself.

From coordinating a production crew to simply thinking of an image and having it appear

Before AI emerged, what did it mean to shoot a reasonably polished MV (music video)?

Assembling a team, finding cinematographers, art directors, lighting, and post-production staff; refining the script, making storyboards, scheduling, scouting locations—if any single link went wrong, an idea could die before it was born. Like all professional creators, Senhai spent years honing his craft within these processes, developing systematic capabilities: understanding workflow, shots, storytelling, and how to negotiate with clients.

After AI burst onto the scene, he felt for the first time that the skills of an entire production crew were gradually being compressed into one person.

He puts it amusingly: in video creation, AI is my cinematographer, going out to “shoot” the images in my mind.

In the past, you either lacked the money to shoot, the time to learn, or the resources to build something; many ideas could only keep circling in your head. Now, all you need is a set of AI tools that works well for you, and you can quickly bring images to life and experiment.

It is precisely because he had built such a foundation in the traditional industry that he saw earlier than many others that, once AI strips away layer after layer of barriers unrelated to expression, only two real questions remain:

What do you want to express?

How do you plan to express it?

Technology is no longer scarce; expression is.

When the hard barriers to creation are destroyed, the soft barriers—aesthetic sensibility, taste, and worldview—become the new moat instead.

So he simply threw himself into the most fiercely competitive AI-video track: AI short dramas, AI animated dramas, motion comics, and then integrations with cultural tourism, advertising, and corporate promotion, allowing images to reach larger contexts.

You will find that he was not learning AI from scratch; rather, he plugged years of accumulated film, television, and storytelling ability into a more obedient machine production crew that complains less.

“Staying true to yourself” is the hardest commercial choice of this era

In 2024, Senhai began entering various AI competitions. Some of his works won awards; several MVs with a strong personal character circulated within the scene, and he gradually acquired the title of AI super creator.

But if you think he would begin by talking about how he built viral hits or precisely caught trends, you would be mistaken.

The sentence he says most often is instead: follow the pace of the most mischievous child inside you.

This is not empty inspirational rhetoric, but a very clear-eyed choice.

There are too many temptations in the AI creation scene: platform incentives, brand collaborations, algorithmic dividends, races with peers… Any one metric can easily hijack a person’s creative direction.

Every day, when you open social media, you see which subjects are more popular, which styles produce better images, and which titles are more likely to achieve high completion rates. That small impulse to express what is truly yours can easily be squeezed out without a sound.

Senhai chose another path:

First ask yourself: Am I genuinely moved by this?

He believes in a seemingly classical rule:

What moves you can also move others. Even if it does not, it has at least moved you, so you have lost nothing.

It sounds uncommercial, but on closer thought, you find a new equation for the AI era hidden within it: when the cost of creation falls extremely low, time and budget no longer constitute decisive constraints. What becomes scarcest is what, exactly, you are willing to take responsibility for.

Are you willing to take responsibility for what the algorithm likes, or for who you are?

What appears to be merely a choice of creative attitude is in fact quietly determining what kinds of audiences and collaborators you will attract, and whether you will reach long-term arenas such as paid content and IP licensing.

Staying true to yourself is no longer merely the idealism that artsy young people like to talk about; it is a choice with increasingly tangible returns.

Super individuals and small teams: finding your place in flux

From an outsider’s perspective, Senhai looks like a typical “one-person company”: a distinct personal brand, recognizable work, and stable commercial collaborations.

But the state he describes for himself is one of flexible switching between a “super individual” and a “small team.”

When he needs to quietly sort through his expression and spend time alone with himself, he closes the door and becomes a lone ranger;

when a project requires coordinated action, he assembles familiar partners in different combinations and rebuilds a small team around each project.

This sounds like a simple choice of working style, but behind it lies a distinctly AI-era understanding:

The only constant in the world is change itself, and AI is pushing the speed of that change to a new level.

In the past, team structure was a fixed asset: once established, it implied long-term costs and path dependence.

Now, as AI tools compress much repetitive work, a creator’s roles are beginning to overlap: both director and producer; both content lead and human-resources manager; required to understand both aesthetics and project management.

He creates while observing: Who is suited to shine in which position? Who is more efficient on what type of project? What combination can make everyone suffer a little less?

These experiments ultimately crystallized into his own small body of organizational theory.

In this sense, a “super individual” is not a lone hero doing everything alone; it is more like a new kind of central role:

You need to be able to see both the image and the people.

You need to understand both the rhythm of content and the rhythm of collaboration.

And a team is no longer a list of names fixed on an organizational chart, but a “dynamic living organism” that can continually reorganize itself according to the project.

AI has not “freed” him; instead, it has cut off his retreat

Most interesting is his attitude toward AI tools.

While public discourse is full of claims that AI frees creators and releases them from arduous labor, he offers a completely different perspective:

AI has not freed me. On the contrary, it has bound me tightly to itself.

He frankly admits that he can scarcely do without AI in almost every respect.

When knowledge is lacking, AI is an encyclopedia;

when inspiration is lacking, AI is an idea bank;

when execution is insufficient, AI is an efficient employee.

In video creation, AI is the cinematographer, the visual-effects artist, post-production, and a virtual production crew.

It is efficient, low-cost, available on demand, never complains, and does not require an appearance fee.

The problem is that people can become spoiled.

Once you become accustomed to this nearly instant feedback, it is hard to return to the old rhythm of painstaking craftsmanship.

Waiting for the weather, locations, schedules, and an entire team to find its rhythm all begin to feel like an intolerably inefficient process.

He keenly identified something worth being wary of:

If the ultimate form of AI efficiency tools is to compress the creative process until only selection and confirmation remain,

if, in that process, creators lose the pleasure of exploring, experimenting, and starting over after overturning everything,

then viewers of the work will sooner or later lose the pleasure of watching as well.

Behind this statement lies a larger question: when everything can be generated quickly, what kinds of works are we still expecting?

If creators no longer suffer and rejoice at once, what real emotions can audiences still feel in their work?

What AI brings is far more than a question of efficiency; it is reshaping our relationship with creation itself.

The real leverage: not making you work faster, but making you “finally start working”

When discussing AI’s leverage effect, most people talk about 10x efficiency or 100x output.

Senhai’s answer is once again unexpected.

The most important leverage is not how much faster or better it lets me work; it is that it gets me started.

This sentence strikes at a fact many people are unwilling to acknowledge:

What prevents us from accomplishing something is often not that we are too slow, but that we never started at all.

Traditional creation has a great deal of friction: you need to prepare, reserve time, imagine the return on the effort invested, and overcome the fear of “what if I mess it up?”

Every threshold quietly drains your inner drive.

What AI does is reduce these psychological costs inch by inch: you can start a project at any time; if you are dissatisfied, delete it, without having to bear an overly severe sense of failure;

you can experiment and revise as you go, without waiting for a complete process to run its course before turning things around;

you can even, on a sleepless night, open a tool and first shape a vague idea into a few images or several dozen seconds of video, then decide the next day whether it is worth continuing.

When starting becomes effortless and feedback becomes timely enough, the inner engine in a person’s body is ignited little by little.

You are no longer merely someone who imagines in your head, “I have lots of ideas,” but someone who begins continuously delivering work.

The value of the future is likely hidden in this differentiation at scale: when AI enables everyone to create faster, what truly widens the gap is not whether you can use a particular tool, but how much work that is genuinely yours you are willing to create with it.

Being seen comes before being paid

Returning to a practical question: How does a super individual make a living?

Clear demand, direct communication, and fast cash-flow recovery—these are the basic foundations on which many professional creators survive.

But he also knows very well that what truly has long-term competitiveness remains capabilities rooted in content itself: paid content, IP licensing, and even derivative lines of business extending from one’s personal style.

What AI provides here is a wholly new amplifier: it can magnify an individual’s value to the point of being “seen enough.”

When you can produce work with your personal imprint more frequently and more consistently, and when your aesthetics, views, and ways of storytelling are repeatedly reinforced across a body of work, your probability of being seen grows exponentially.

People will pay for “content they identify with,”

and before identification, they must at least first “see” it.

This is also why efficiency tools ultimately still point to a very plain conclusion:

What is truly worth amplifying is that small, unique thing within you, not the so-called templates others teach you.

For those who want to enter the field: first ask what kind of person you really want to become

Many people ask him:

I also want to become an AI creator, build an AI-focused media channel, and create a one-person company. Which skills and tools should I start learning?

If you expect a list of tools, it can certainly be made very professional, from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to various image- and video-generation models, and then project-management tools such as Feishu Bitable.

But what he truly wants to say is at another level: skills and tools are merely “technique”;

the underlying principles always come first.

So-called early positioning does not mean learning every tool; it means first thinking through a harder question:

In this AI era, what kind of person do you really want to become?

Do you want to become someone highly sensitive to traffic, constantly adjusting your style to cater to algorithms,

or someone with their own coordinate system, willing to take responsibility for their own expression?

The former is not necessarily wrong, nor is the latter necessarily nobler,

but you must at least know what you are choosing.

Senhai’s answer has always been: strip everything else away, and only stay true to yourself.

Only by boldly being yourself can you have a chance to gain a piece of territory that truly belongs to you.

AI will continue to evolve, and tools will be updated generation after generation.

The workflows popular today may become old news next year.

The only thing that can cut through these cycles is the person who, even late at night and when no one is applauding, is still willing to sit down in front of a screen, in front of AI, in front of themselves, and continue pondering: What exactly do I want to say?

Once you have thought this through,

AI is no longer a shiny new toy,

but an extra pen in your hand when you speak with the world.

Selected Interview Q&A

Q1: Please introduce yourself first. What three labels would describe you?

Senhai: I’m Senhai, founder of Senhai Fluorescence Studio, an AIGC super creator, and a former visual director at China Media Group’s CCTV. My three labels are: childlike wonder intact, contrast, and flashes of inspiration.

Q2: How did you determine your positioning in AI video?

Senhai: I was already working in film and television. After AI arrived, it allowed me to become a “one-person team.” Projects that originally required resources and time can now be completed by one person, so I became even more determined to focus my energy on “what I want to express and how to express it,” rather than on the tools themselves.

Q3: What is the biggest trend you see in AI video right now?

Senhai: It is deep integration with traditional film, television, and animation—especially AI short dramas, AI animated dramas, motion comics, and integration with cultural tourism, advertising, and corporate promotion—using lower costs to create more imaginative content.

Q4: How did people in the scene come to know you?

Senhai: I entered some AI competitions in 2024 and won awards. Later, I made several MVs in my own style that were widely shared. But the core is still this: follow the mischievous child inside you and make content that can move you.

Q5: Are you now “one person” or a “small team”?

Senhai: My model is ‘super individual + flexible small team.’ When I need quiet time to create, I close the door and work alone. When a project calls for a coordinated push, I bring together different partners for that project and adjust the team dynamically.

Q6: What role does AI play in your workflow? Has it truly “freed” you?

Senhai: Honestly, it has not “freed” me; instead, it has bound me more tightly. At times it is a teacher, at times a partner, and at times an employee. It helps me fill knowledge gaps, generate ideas, and execute, but it has also made it impossible for me to return to that especially slow traditional rhythm.

Q7: What are your main sources of monetization now?

Senhai: At present, advertising collaborations and commercial commissions account for the most, and the cash flow is relatively direct. In the long term, I place more value on paid content and IP licensing. The new opportunity AI gives me is this: it amplifies an individual’s voice to the point of being “seen enough.” Only by being seen can you have a chance of being paid for.

Q8: What is AI’s greatest leverage for you?

Senhai: It is not about making you 10 times more efficient; it is that it finally gets you ‘to start.’ Most people are not slow at doing things; they simply have not started at all. AI lowers the threshold for ‘starting’ dramatically and gives you timely feedback, igniting your inner drive.

Q9: What advice would you give to people who want to become AI creators or build one-person companies?

Senhai: Do not get hung up from the outset on which set of tools to use. First think clearly: What exactly do you want to do, and what kind of person do you want to become? Skills and tools are all “technique”; what truly needs to be planned in advance is the “Way”—strip everything else away, and dare to stay true to yourself.

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Original publication: https://uniqueresearch.substack.com/p/src-20251116-01html
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/src-20251116-01html