ByteDance’s TikTok has taken over social media. Now that AI is taking Hollywood by storm

Earlier this year, a 15-second AI-generated video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on a rooftop went viral, sparking outrage across Hollywood. One screenwriter described the film’s clips as “terrifying”. The Motion Picture Association has called on Chinese tech giant ByteDance, the company behind the artificial intelligence tools, to stop its “infringing practices”.

Despite the uproar, TikTok’s former majority owner has quietly continued courting filmmakers, independent artists and executives eager to adopt its AI video generation model, called Seedance.

SeaDance launched in the U.S. this spring at an event in Santa Monica hosted by a group with ties to the Chinese government.

ByteDance begins hiring 100 unresolved roleshas signed multiple independent filmmakers and artists and had private conversations about funding AI films. The company had the luxury caviar party in cannes and was held in May panel The company promoted its film tools at Amazon’s AI on the Lot event in Culver City.

“Like any new technology, Hollywood ultimately has no choice but to react to market realities, and that reality is that Hollywood’s new AI-powered creators believe that Seadance has the most powerful video generator on the market today,” said Peter Cassasy of Creative Media, an entertainment and AI business advisory firm.

Joel Kwahara, an animation producer on the early seasons of “The Simpsons,” echoed Hollywood’s quiet embrace.

“I know within the industry that a lot of studios don’t approve of SeaDance, but with a wink and a nod, they allow SeaDance to be used. … It’s like, ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,'” Kuwabara told the Times.

ByteDance declined to comment on its expansion in the United States.

The race to build the dominant AI video model is creating fierce competition, pitting American companies against their rapidly shrinking Chinese competitors. On the American side, Google Veo This includes startups like Runway and Luma. OpenAI Sora has discontinued the video tool.

CHINA’S CHALLENGERS sea ​​danceKling and Alibaba’s Happy Horse quickly closed the gap in film realism and outperformed its American rivals by undercutting them in terms of cost.

According to artificial analysisa company that tracks the cost and performance of various AI models, China’s Seedance is currently the most cost-effective and high-quality option compared to its US competitors. Seedance costs $9 per minute for video with audio generation, which is significantly lower than the $24 per minute required by Google’s Veo model.

That makes it an attractive tool for independent filmmakers like Rupert Wainwright, who recently met with Seadance executives. lots of AI.

He hopes to use this tool to help create a feature film called “”.sebastianThe hybrid AI film about Christian saints set in 3rd century Rome will be partially shot on location in Europe and partially generated by artificial intelligence.

“This is the same thing as finally being able to stream movies to your TV over the Internet,” Wainwright said.

“Paranormal Activity” producer Steven Schneider, known for his hand-held, grainy style of filmmaking, said in May:terrariumThe film’s director, Jason Zada, said the film will be entirely generated using the Seadance model.

Zada’s filmmaking workflow includes scripting, casting, prompting, and editing all at the same time, and the script can be rewritten based on the “daily reports” that the AI ​​generates that day.

He estimates that it costs as little as $5 to produce a 15-second high-definition video.

“You start with a very detailed outline, a very detailed character, and you can make it a little more fluid because you can regenerate it.[erate] As much as you like,” Zada ​​said.

Director Zada ​​plans to shoot the film on a sound stage using real actors first, and will later decide which parts are more traditionally effective and what should be done overall. He is a member of the Directors Guild of America and said he would hire actors from the union for hybrid AI films.

Seedance also continues to build relationships by serving independent creators, AI-native studios, and filmmakers. free monthly credits Access to unreleased features. These “sense maker” beta test the model, provide feedback on what works, and use it for personal filmmaking projects. This increases your company’s brand awareness.

Kavan Cardoza is one of those film directors who made a big splash. AI fantasy series “The “Bone Chronicle” It uses Seedance and features six different storylines and ensembles of characters. New episodes are each less than 30 minutes long and are released once a month on YouTube. This one-man filmmaker averages 3 million views per episode and reaches 500,000 viewers on YouTube.

While most filmmakers are tool agnostic, Cardoza has recently become completely reliant on Seedance, he said. Because Seedance solves the persistent problem of maintaining character consistency between shots.

To create one of his characters, The Last Lost, Cardoza took a self-portrait wearing a three-face mask and a tattered brown jacket. He used those reference images for AI characters, transforming them into stylized figures with personalities, backstories, and visual details. He fed those images back into Seedance to get consistent characters and repeated the process for each member of the cast.

“I can’t go get Brad Pitt, because it costs like $5 million, $10 million, $20 million to be in my movie,” Cardoza said. “In the future, we’ll probably have synthetic actors who act as good as Brad Pitt. That’s crazy to me.”

Cardoza owns the copyright to his script and characters, and hopes to eventually attract the interest of a major studio to turn his intellectual property into a film with an embedded fan base.

Such a plan would likely face resistance from performers union SAG-AFTRA, which has condemned the use of synthetic actors like Tilly Norwood.

“Ultimately, the rise of Seadance [its] Focus on pleasing the filmmakers and making something that looks like a movie,” said Stefan Vladimir Bugai, senior vice president of Geostar, a joint venture between Disney and India’s Reliance Industries.

ByteDance introduced timeline-based prompts that allow filmmakers to actually pick out specific moments and tweak them, improving their understanding of camera direction, physics, lighting, and the fluidity of action. All of this “has unlocked the potential for a kind of spectacle filmmaking that hasn’t been successfully realized in other models,” Bugai said.

Zada said the company’s tools are in such high demand that Seadance is offering some major Hollywood studios $2 million for unlimited special access.

Luma CEO Amit Jain acknowledged SeaDance’s popularity and expansion in the U.S., but said its ceiling in Hollywood is very limited. Traditional studios may adopt the Chinese model for some pre-production tasks such as concept creation, but the geopolitical and intellectual property risks are too high for the commercial generation.

“Can you imagine Disney using a ByteDance model for the next Snow White? No way,” Jain said. “Actually, this isn’t even a technical discussion. That’s the reality.”

Luma is moving into Hollywood to sell its software, but it’s also funding it separately. production service company It’s about teaching filmmakers how to use that tool to create hybrid AI movies.

Despite modest production budgets, AI spending by media companies is projected to increase from $2.6 billion to $12.5 billion from 2024 to 2029, according to a report from the State of Generative AI Media.

Bugazi warned that the quality and competitive prices of Chinese models should serve as a “wake-up call” for U.S. companies competing for market share.

“We are not faithful,” said Zada, the filmmaker. “Whatever is best, we’re going to use it.”