ByteDance, the Chinese technology company behind TikTok, has announced it will throttle its AI video creation tools following a threat of lawsuits from Disney and backlash from other media companies, according to reports.
Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator released last week, wowed Hollywood as it lets users create realistic clips of movie stars and superheroes with just a short text prompt.
Some of Hollywood’s biggest studios have accused the tool of copyright infringement.
On Friday, Walt Disney reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, accusing it of providing SeaDance with a “pirated library” of the studio’s characters, including characters from Marvel and Star Wars, according to US news agency Axios.
According to a report by the BBC, Disney’s lawyers claimed that ByteDance had “effectively usurped” Disney’s intellectual property.
However, TikTok’s owner told the BBC that the company “respects intellectual property rights and has heard your concerns about Seadance 2.0.”
“We are taking steps to strengthen our current safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of our intellectual property and likeness by our users,” a company spokesperson told the broadcaster, without providing further details on the plan.
Seedance can generate videos based on just a few lines of text. Last week, Rhett Reese, co-writer of Deadpool and Wolverine, Zombieland, and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, said after watching a widely shared AI-generated clip of a fight scene between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt that “the end is probably coming for us.”
He added, “Soon, one person will be able to sit down at a computer and make a movie that is indistinguishable from what Hollywood is releasing today. Sure, it would be bad if that person was bad. But if that person had the talent and taste of Christopher Nolan (and people like him are rapidly emerging), it would be tremendous.”
The first version of Seedance was launched last June.
The Motion Picture Association of America, a Hollywood trade group that represents studios like Paramount, Warner Bros. and Netflix, accused ByteDance of “massive misappropriation of U.S. copyrighted works.” Actors’ union Sag Aftra accused Seadance of “blatant rights violations”.
This is the latest clash in Hollywood amid anxiety over the impact of AI on the future of entertainment. Artists and the creative industry are seeking compensation for the use of their materials and the establishment of licensing frameworks that allow them to use their content legally.
Last year, Disney and NBCUniversal sued AI image generation company Midjourney for what the studios claimed were “unlimited unauthorized copies.”
But creative companies are also doing business with AI businesses. Last year, Disney announced a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow the company to use some of its Disney characters in its Sora video generation tool.
ByteDance and Walt Disney have been contacted for comment.
