The emergence of AI-generated visual media has reconfigured the production– distribution relationship on Chinese short-video platforms. On the production side, AI reduces costs, diminishes the need for large teams, and lowers professional barriers through models, workflows, and computational power, enabling individuals to enter the field of content creation. Yet on the distribution side, such openness has not translated into formal innovation. Instead, through the combined effects of platform algorithms, short-video perceptual regimes, and gamified reward mechanisms, AI-generated content has increasingly converged toward a lightweight, highly stimulating, and easily replicable form. This convergence does not lead to an expansion of visual expressive freedom; rather, it facilitates the comprehensive migration of short-drama logic into AI-generated visual media. “Pleasure points,” hooks, upgrades, feedback, and conversion have become new organizing principles, while the narrative depth, authorial subjectivity, and aesthetic autonomy of traditional visual media continue to give way to platform calculability. At the same time, this convergence is also embedded in the technological logic of AI itself. Rather than generating images directly from lived experience, AI reconstructs and recombines existing data relations through probabilistic processes and formal collage, thereby naturally favoring high-frequency, stable, and readily deployable template-based syntax. AI-generated visual media, therefore, is no longer merely a new genre emerging under new technological conditions, but also a concentrated manifestation of the convergence toward visual templateization in the platform era.