The Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade group for Hollywood studios, says China’s new AI service SeaDance 2.0 “engaged in large-scale unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works” on its first day of release.
“By launching its service without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is ignoring established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and supports millions of American jobs. ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activities,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, launched Seedance 2.0 on Thursday (February 12) through its Dreamina AI platform and AI assistant Doubao. The video generation artificial intelligence model accepts prompts that combine text, images, video, and audio and generates clips up to 15 seconds long.
In a blog post announcing the launch, ByteDance said Seedance 2.0 “delivers a significant leap forward in production quality,” offering “significant improvements in physical accuracy, visual realism, and control, and is highly tuned for industrial-grade creation scenarios, improving usability rates for complex interactions and motion scenes.”
The launch of the service has not only prompted a response from the MPA, but has already caused alarm among some filmmakers.
About X, visual effects artist, writer and director Ruairi Robinson posted a clip to Seadance 2.0 that was allegedly generated from a two-line prompt showing an AI battle between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Robinson added the comment, “If Hollywood is cooking, maybe everyone is right. If Hollywood is cooking, it’s funny that everyone is overcooking.”
This clip was reposted by Rhett Reese, writer of features such as: deadpool & wolverinecommented, “The Pitt vs. Cruise video surprised me, because it was so professional. That’s exactly why I’m scared. My glass-half-empty view is that Hollywood is about to undergo a revolution and go down. If you really thought the Pitt vs. Cruise video was unimpressive and sloppy, don’t worry. But I’m upset.”
