A major Hollywood group is criticizing SeaDance for its use of copyrighted characters such as Spider-Man and Darth Vader. Disney and Paramount issued a cease-and-desist letter requiring Seadance to stop using the content. Japan is also investigating ByteDance on suspicion of copyright infringement after an AI video of a popular anime character went viral.
ByteDance said it was taking steps to “enhance current safeguards.” This is not limited to Chinese companies.
In 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using articles without permission to train their own AI models. Reddit sued Perplexity last year, accusing the AI company of illegally harvesting user posts. Disney raised similar concerns with Google.
Mitchell said clearly labeling content to prevent deception and building public trust in AI is far more important than “cool-looking” videos.
That’s why developers need to create systems to manage licenses and payments, and provide clear mechanisms to challenge abuse, she added.
Disney, for example, signed a $1bn (£730m) deal with OpenAI’s Sora to use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel.
University of Melbourne computing professor Sharnan Corney said Seadance’s developers were likely aware of the potential copyright issues associated with using Western intellectual property and would have taken the risk anyway.
“There is plenty of room to strategically bend the rules or ignore them for a while to gain marketing influence,” he added.
On the other hand, for small businesses, Seedance is too useful to ignore.
Kwok, of Singapore’s Tiny Island Productions, says this quality of AI will allow companies like his to produce films that are much more expensive than they would otherwise be able to afford.
He gave the example of short-form videos and microdramas, which are booming in Asia and are typically produced on a low budget, costing around $140,000 for as many as 80 episodes of less than two minutes each.
These productions have stuck to romance and family drama to keep costs down as fewer visual effects are required. But now, Kwok says, AI “can elevate low-budget productions into more ambitious genres like science fiction, period dramas, and now action.”
