No, Disney didn’t release footage of a never-before-seen fight scene between Marvel’s Wolverine and Thanos (spoiler: Thanos won).
The clip, which has racked up more than 142,000 views on X in 48 hours, was created using Seedance 2.0, an AI video generation model that ByteDance debuted last week. The tool created a buzz on social media, with one user creating a surreal AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting over Jeffrey Epstein.
Given the AI industry’s established strategy of “asking for forgiveness, not permission,” ByteDance’s decision to let users create content based on Disney IP without permission is not all that surprising.
Disney, which is notorious for aggressively protecting its intellectual property, doesn’t necessarily have the same response to threats.
On Friday, the entertainment company sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns SeaDance and TikTok, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider.
In the letter, Disney accused ByteDance of providing SeaDance 2.0 with “a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney series as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.”
“Despite Disney’s well-known objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney characters by copying, distributing, and creating derivative works,” the letter said.
Seadance is the only latest AI company to claim that Disney is ripping it off.
Disney and NBCUniversal sued AI image generation company Midjourney last June. In the lawsuit, the companies compared Midjourney’s technology to a “virtual vending machine that endlessly generates unauthorized copies of Disney and Universal copyrighted material.”
Disney then accused Character.AI of copyright infringement in a cease and desist letter last September. In December, it sent a letter to Google in response to its AI image generation software Nano Banana Pro and other AI models, accusing the Big Tech giant of stealing its IP “at scale.” Both companies have since removed Disney characters from their platforms.
However, Disney is not anti-AI, and its strategy is not one-size-fits-all. The company took a much less adversarial approach to OpenAI, the world’s leading AI startup.
After OpenAI introduced Sora 2, its AI-powered text-to-video conversion platform, in September, users began uploading IP-heavy content featuring Disney characters to social media. But instead of a cease and desist notice or legal action, Disney negotiated a deal.
By December, Disney and OpenAI announced a three-year licensing agreement that would give Sora users access to 200 Disney characters, with some guardrails. As part of the deal, Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI.
Disney has not disclosed plans to develop its own AI models or video generators, but Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company ultimately views the technology not as a threat but as a new avenue to connect with viewers.
In an earnings call late last year, he said the AI will “give Disney+ users a more engaging experience, including the ability to create user-generated content and consume user-generated content (primarily in short-form format) from others.”
