Text-to-video generation tools have come a long way over the years.
A horrifying clip in 2023 of actor Will Smith’s distorted face momentarily merging with a bowl of spaghetti turned into a far more realistic clip of him enjoying a plate of pasta (complete with a soundtrack of creepy crunching and munching sounds) just two years later.
Now, ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, has raised the bar once again by releasing the latest version of its Seedance AI video generation tool. It didn’t take long for clips from The Lord of the Rings, photorealistic footage of rapper Kanye West and ex-wife Kim Kardashian facing off in a dramatic Mandarin movie scene, and of course Will Smith battling the ferocious Spaghetti Monster, to be making the rounds on social media.
This impressive technical feat seemed to shock Hollywood, with Deadpool screenwriter Rhett Reese lamenting that while he “hate to say it” about “X,” it was “probably the end for us.”
Ms Rees was reacting to extremely realistic footage of actors Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise engaging in hand-to-hand combat on a partially collapsed bridge.
The advent of powerful AI-based generative video tools has sent the entertainment industry into a panic, with actors warning that they could one day be replaced entirely. Highly influential voices in the industry are speaking out against technology across the board, warning of the death of human agency and creativity.
as BBC According to reports, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) was furious that ByteDance’s latest tools were being used to generate clips of celebrities.
“In a single day, Chinese AI service Seadance 2.0 committed massive misappropriation of U.S. copyrighted material,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
In response, ByteDance claims it has stopped its ability to generate clips of real people. But it remains to be seen how effective the company’s approach to guardrails will be, given OpenAI’s continued struggles with its own video generation tools.
Rivkin accused the company of not only allowing users to generate hyper-realistic clips of celebrities, but also allowing rampant copyright infringement.
“By launching a service that operates without meaningful protections against copyright infringement, ByteDance is ignoring established copyright laws that protect the rights of creators and support millions of American jobs.” BBC. “ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activities.”
Others in the entertainment industry tend to agree.
“Everything I’ve seen on this model (Sedance 2) is copyright infringement,” Roblox product manager Peter Yang tweeted.
In short, the latest AI release once again highlights the highly contentious battle over copyright and human performer representation in an entertainment landscape that changes with each new AI release.
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