Videos featuring smart toilet paper dispensers that require people to watch short ads to receive toilet paper strips in public toilets have gone viral in China.

Ever since it started its new era of booming national tourism, China has experimented with ingenious ways of preventing toilet paper waste. Back in 2017, international news outlets reported the introduction of facial scanners connected to toilet paper dispensers that only offered one 60-cm-long strip of paper per scan, or every nine minutes. It was reported that the system was implemented at popular tourism spots where people took as much toilet paper as possible for fear of not finding any when they came back later. AI technology was introduced in 2019, when toilet paper dispensers began dispensing strips of paper once every 10 minutes per individual user. But now, technology has evolved even more with toilet paper dispensers that play ads to release short strips of paper.