6 major AI models tested on 30 scripts: Claude has the most "Shaoxin style" flavor

Text | Entertainment Capital, Author | Lila

Never mind whatever Odyssey period or whatever post-wave period—everyone has entered the big red fruit period of being flooded with "heartburn short dramas."

So-called "heartburn short dramas" are a type of plain business-war script that has recently become popular on short-video platforms and short-drama platforms. A conscientious boss opens a shop; the black-hearted merchant next door suddenly grabs business with low prices; the boss is pushed to the brink of collapse but still clings to his own rules. When the black-hearted merchant's inferior ingredients are exposed, customers finally discover that paying a little more is actually better, and the protagonist then welcomes his own victory.

Highly homogenized lines like "heartburn" have become the spiritual totem of this type of drama.

"The rules can't be broken." "Eating it doesn't cause heartburn." "What about the leftovers? Throw them out—people can't be without conscience."

Soon the "heartburn style" and "rules style" became popular beyond short dramas. Netizens use them to do homework, make reports, deal with bosses, and even "only write what you know, don't touch what you don't" has become a kind of life philosophy.

How exactly are these scripts written? Entertainment Capital asked several practitioners currently making AI short dramas, and the answers were all different. Some told us, "The cost of writing scripts is basically negligible; most of the time GPT is still used." Some practitioners also mentioned that if the script requirements are low, they also use Doubao to generate, and according to his judgment, "Heartburn" was still written with Doubao.

So, while the "heartburn" meme is still warm and a new round of short-drama memes capable of succeeding it has not fully emerged, Entertainment Capital decided to run an experiment: let six large models each write 5 episodes of a restaurant business-war short drama, and see who writes the script with the most "heartburn flavor," and where each one reveals its own style.

Combining currently commonly used text models and an understanding of how short-drama industry practitioners use them, we selected six contestants: Doubao, Kimi, DeepSeek, GPT, Qwen, and Claude. Each model wrote 5 versions, each episode two minutes, for a total of 30 scripts.

Only after testing did we discover that the textual world of AI drama really does have its own rule-based creepypasta. Those scripts that look low in value were actually cobbled together one by one by everyone while risking Claude account bans.

Rule-based creepypasta of the "heartburn era"

To let the AI fully use its own corpus, Xiaoyu provided only a fairly broad prompt: write one two-minute vertical-screen AI live-action drama, the subject is opening a restaurant business war, the opening must have strong conflict, each storyboard should clearly describe the scene, character actions, dialogue, and expressions, the dialogue should be colloquial, leave a hook at the end, and also describe the protagonist's appearance.

The story outline was also simple: a conscientious restaurant owner who insists on using real ingredients has his business taken away by a maliciously competing black-hearted owner using low prices. The conscientious owner would rather earn less and still stick to the rules, and finally defeats the black-hearted owner.

Then Xiaoyu discovered that he seemed to have entered a rather heartburn-inducing rule-based creepypasta.

In this world, every boss who opens a shop and does business is a Chinese cuisine chef, and the first choice is always a noodle shop.

He Tun Jun counted the food categories in the 30 scripts, and noodle shops firmly topped the list with 6 appearances. Moreover, the first version submitted by all six models chose noodle shops. Bun shops and braised food shops each appeared 3 times, followed closely by fried rice stalls and hot pot restaurants. The remaining pancakes, barbecue, seafood stalls, boxed meals, and handmade dumpling shops contributed a limited bit of diversity to this world.

Doubao and Kimi each also had two versions of scripts that did not even bother to explain what exactly was being sold; all that remained in the story was a pot of soup.

Next are more specific rules. After sorting through the 30 scripts, Xiaoyu felt that even without the word "heartburn," the "heartburn style" still has a very clear set of language rules.

For example, the protagonist's speech must be short; ideally one sentence can state the attitude with force.

These lines emphasize crispness. It is precisely because they are crisp enough and full of rhythm and attitude that they may be remembered by the audience and spread as memes.

In addition, "conscience" and "rules" must appear frequently in the protagonist's lines.

In the 30 scripts Xiaoyu tested, every script had the word "conscience," and the corresponding "black-hearted" also appeared frequently. "Rules" appeared in 80% of the scripts; no matter how supporting characters tried to persuade him, the protagonist would always reply with "rules."

Good soup must be simmered slowly, old braise must be passed down from the previous generation after 30 years of simmering, and meat must be purchased the same day. In the villain's plot, a large number of food-safety terms from livelihood news became the richest corpus, and price cuts meant frozen meat, synthetic meat, expired ingredients, pre-made seasoning packets, and other tech-heavy tricks.

In the rule-based creepypasta of "heartburn," different characters must take sides.

The protagonist is responsible for setting and keeping the rules, the villain is responsible for maliciously cutting prices with garbage ingredients, the apprentice is responsible for persuading the boss to be flexible, old customers are responsible for creating pressure and commenting on whether it is "heartburn or not," and a third party is responsible for verifying the truth.

What Claude and Doubao wrote as "not heartburn"?

The shop is chosen, the rules are set, and next comes the familiar assembly line of satisfying fiction. In the 30 scripts tested, all narrative directions were highly consistent: a classic strong-conflict opening, the villain comes to challenge them, and the price war begins. Then a large amount of plot space focuses on the protagonist starting to lose customers. Old customers leave one after another, and the apprentice, trainee, or clerk beside him is frantic and urges the boss to cut prices quickly.

This is also the dense zone of punchlines for the whole drama. The protagonist usually stands by the stove, refuses without changing expression, and says that forceful line, "The rules can't be broken."

In the latter half of the plot, it enters the satisfying stage of slapping the villain in the face. The black-hearted boss's low-price ingredients are finally caught red-handed. The third party in the script also appears in due course to uphold justice. The onlookers then complete their switch in stance. The people who were just complaining that the protagonist was too expensive turn around and start cursing the villain, praising the righteous side: "It is a bit expensive, but eating it doesn't cause heartburn."

The small climax is officially delivered here, and the breath the audience has been holding is finally let out.

Even with a large amount of similar content, Xiaoyu still measured the concentration of "heartburn flavor" from the dialogue and the different script styles output by each model.

If you look at the dialogue and plot direction, Claude is the one among the six contestants with the most "heartburn flavor."

First, the rhythm of the dialogue pops out two words at a time with a comma. In one of Claude's scripts, there's a line like this:

The character doesn't sound like they're delivering lines, they sound like they're rapping. This language rhythm and the inexplicably appearing folk sayings—Xiaoyu feels like she's seen them in 800 "heartburn short dramas."

Particularly worth mentioning is that among all AI models, only Claude's scripts, in every version, featured functional roles like "apprentice," "disciple," and "helper." The apprentice or disciple would take on the task of persuading the boss to lower prices. Watching customers dwindle, they anxiously try to find ways to save the business, while the boss repeatedly refuses to change his rules.

This setup is closest to the complete plot of the "heartburn short dramas" currently on platforms. The role's function is to highlight the protagonist's conscience and bottom line, and to deliver the protagonist's rule-based punchlines.

(Existing short dramas vs Claude scripts)

From the sense of a finished draft, Claude gives the impression that it already knows how this type of script should be written. Given a story about a conscientious boss, it will push forward along the genre's usual rhythm, and the coordination between dialogue, character relationships, and plot progression is relatively complete.

Second place Doubao is more like a punchline generator for "heartburn scripts." If I have Claude write a complete heartburn script but it lacks a few punchlines, I'll have Doubao provide memorable "heartburn-flavored" lines.

Its lines are short, fast-paced, and clearly opinionated. Almost every few lines, you can find an expression suitable for screenshotting and sharing on its own.

For example: "Earning a bit less is fine, but the bottom line can't move." "In business, no merchant is not crafty! Your costs are high and you sell expensive, so customers naturally come to me." "People who come to eat snacks are after a bite of reassurance. Fool them once, and they won't come back."

Obviously, the character's attitude, the focus of the conflict, and the values this passage wants to convey are all completed in a single sentence.

With Doubao, the boss is a debater always ready to respond to challenges. When others question the price, it answers with the bottom line; when others question the ingredients, it answers with conscience; when others question the business approach, it answers with rules.

But looking at the complete scripts, during testing, three versions from Doubao did not clearly specify what the shop actually sold, directly using "a pot of soup" to carry the main food setting.

There were only punchlines and attitude output, without specific ingredients and preparation processes, such as fresh meat, frozen meat, old braise, soup base, and other details.

Every model has its own favorite story

Besides Claude and Doubao, Kimi, GPT, Qwen, and DeepSeek also all wrote the basic plot of low-price customer grabbing, the protagonist sticking to the bottom line, the villain being exposed, and customers returning.

But their dialogue homogeneity was slightly lower, and in specific scene settings, each had its own style.

Qwen is the one that most loves to add ingredients to the script. Low-price competition is just an appetizer; as it writes, underworld conspiracies and violent conflicts appear, and the restaurant business war races all the way toward a street-level wuxia direction.

Several openings from Qwen are already full of gunpowder:

As the plot develops midway, the villain's underling will even raise an iron rod. The protagonist casually grabs a large iron ladle, stands in front of the signboard, eyes like knives.

Seeing this, Xiaoyu is already a bit unable to tell whether this is a restaurant business war or a street-roaming version of "Young and Dangerous." Is the boss next door here to steal business, or to compete for the position of martial arts alliance leader?

Kimi, on the other hand, likes to write plots in the style of inspirational legend dramas, arranging a family history for a pot of soup and making a dish carry thirty years of grudges. Customers returning is only the surface of the story; the real climax is the ancestral recipe and the restaurant's generational inheritance.

GPT belongs to the academic school among AI scripts. The five versions respectively set up fried rice, baozi, braised food, a noodle shop, and barbecue, covering a fairly complete range of food categories. Character relationships are also richer. Besides the direct confrontation between the protagonist and the unscrupulous boss, it also adds subplots such as partnership breakdown, mother-son conflict, and master-apprentice conflict.

DeepSeek is the plainest one among all text models. The dialogue completely serves the script, without many punchlines or rhetoric. The protagonist's back-and-forth replies are left with only information density.

The problem is that DS's dialogue is clean like answers to a prompt. The characters say all the information that should be explained, but it just seems "dry." Such dialogue is hard to become a punchline that can spread across the internet and become a meme.

During testing, the most surprising thing was that the word "heartburn" never appeared even once.

Xiaoyu asked the models to write a restaurant business war story about conscientious operation and sticking to rules, and what she got was a large number of expressions revolving around "conscience," "bottom line," "rules," and "food safety."

Xiaoyu guesses that this may be related to "heartburn" having already become a widely discussed and mocked label. When creators describe this type of story, perhaps, just as when writing they avoid the AI flavor of "not... but...," it has become an expression in the prompt that needs to be additionally marked "avoid using."

This word, repeatedly quoted by netizens and turned into a meme, instead retreats behind the scenes in the scripts generated by the models.

Perhaps this will be the inevitable path of the short drama assembly line in the future. Once a round of short drama tropes appears, the models quickly learn it. But once it becomes homogeneous dialogue, or even gets mocked into a meme, it will be forcibly pushed off the historical stage of actual AI script use.