{"id":370726,"date":"2026-06-23T02:20:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T09:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/?p=370726"},"modified":"2026-06-23T02:20:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T09:20:04","slug":"journey-to-the-west-is-getting-an-ai-version-the-son-goku-link-nobody-asked-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/journey-to-the-west-is-getting-an-ai-version-the-son-goku-link-nobody-asked-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Journey to the West is getting an AI version: the Son Goku link nobody asked for"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese production company Huace has teamed up with AI label Utopai Studios to make a new series based on Journey to the West<\/a><\/em>, Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s 16th-century<\/strong> novel. This time, they\u2019re doing it with generative AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Every Dragon Ball<\/em> fan already knows the connection. In the early years of the series, Akira Toriyama borrowed a lot from Journey to the West<\/em>, Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s 16th-century story about the monk Xuanzang and his 19-year<\/strong> pilgrimage. But if there\u2019s one part people remember above all, it\u2019s Sun Wukong, the wildly overpowered monkey whose name should sound very familiar for obvious reasons: he\u2019s the character Son Goku was built from.<\/p>\n\n

Now, after hundreds of adaptations, generative AI has apparently decided it needs its own crack at it<\/strong>. And no, nobody asked for this.<\/p>\n\n

Enter the AI boom<\/h2>\n\n

Huace and Utopai Studios say Journey to the West: The Lost Five Hundred Years<\/em> will tell Sun Wukong\u2019s untold origin story, and at least so far, there doesn\u2019t seem to be a single human being<\/strong> attached to the project. No directors, no writers, no actors. Really off to a great start.<\/p>\n\n

And somehow that still isn\u2019t the worst of it. Huace and Utopai Studios are already selling the whole thing as the launchpad for a long-running franchise<\/strong>, with sequels and spin-offs planned for both streaming platforms and theaters.<\/p>\n\n

Generative AI has been welcomed much more openly in China than it has in the West, where plenty of us simply refuse<\/strong> , on principle, to watch something that wasn\u2019t made by an actual human being. So yes, there\u2019s a real chance we\u2019re going to get a lot more AI slop in the next few years: lower investment, higher profit.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cThis is exactly why we created Utopai Studios: to help companies build iconic IP, expand worlds into full-scale franchises, and bring ambitious stories to life in ways that simply weren\u2019t possible before,\u201d<\/em> Utopai Studios said, because apparently the thing people are supposed to get excited about now is even more franchise-ready IP. Still, here we are.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chinese production company Huace has teamed up with AI label Utopai Studios to make a new series based on Journey to the West, Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s 16th-century novel. This time, they\u2019re doing it with generative AI. Every Dragon Ball fan already knows the connection. In the early years of the series, Akira Toriyama borrowed a lot … Continue reading “Journey to the West is getting an AI version: the Son Goku link nobody asked for”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9263,"featured_media":370725,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":0},"categories":[1015],"tags":[],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[],"class_list":["post-370726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":370727,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370726\/revisions\/370727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370726"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=370726"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=370726"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=370726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}