Hollywood rattled as ByteDance's AI tool sparks job, copyright fears

By Derrick Bryson Taylor

 

It took only a 15-second clip of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt duking it out on a crumbling rooftop at twilight to draw swift outrage, and sizable fear, from Hollywood over the last few days.

 

The widely circulated video was created by the Irish director Ruairi Robinson using Seedance 2.0, a powerful artificial intelligence video generation tool owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. 

 

With a two-sentence prompt and the click of a button, Seedance had produced a stunningly realistic result that was a drastic improvement over previously generated artificial intelligence videos, often shoddy clips known as AI slop.

 

 

Rhett Reese, a scriptwriter known for his “Deadpool” films, said in an interview that the Cruise-Pitt video had sent a “cold shiver” up his spine.

 

ByteDance released Seedance 2.0 last week, nearly two months after a previous version had failed to prompt much anger. A news release from the company praised the updated tool’s “physical accuracy, realism and controllability,” which it said was suitable for the needs of “professional-grade creative scenarios.” “The creation process,” the release went on, “is more natural and efficient, allowing users to control their creations like a true ‘director.’” Users promptly flocked to the platform to spin up their own content.  Robinson himself posted additional videos, including of Pitt and Cruise battling a robot, and of Pitt sparring with a sword-wielding “zombie ninja.”

 

At the same time, Hollywood was swift to sit up straight. Charles Rivkin, the chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association, called on ByteDance to “immediately cease its infringing activity,” saying in a statement that Seedance 2.0 had engaged in the unauthorised use of copyrighted works on a “massive scale.” 

 

ByteDance, which also owns TikTok and has been valued at $480 billion in the private markets, did not respond to a request for comment. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, which represents actors and media artists, said its contracts had specific and enforceable rules about digital replication. The kind of material represented by the Cruise-Pitt battle, he said, “could not be produced by any of the signatories to our contracts — the studios, the streamers — without the specific, informed consent of those individuals Not everyone is awed by Seedance’s latest technology. Heather Anne Campbell, an executive producer and a writer on the animated series “Rick and Morty,” said her social media accounts last week had been inundated with Seedance-generated clips of anime, sci-fi and unlikely superhero battles. But she is not yet worried, she said, about losing her job to the technology.

 

“Everybody is, I think, swept up by the circus that came to town and is showing off,” she said. “I haven’t seen anything good yet. Nothing that has taken my breath away, nothing that is poignant, nothing that is provocative even. It’s all just garbage.” Campbell added that AI services like Seedance were at best “averaging machines,” and argued that the greatest art was never made quickly or impersonally.

 

“Everybody is, I think, swept up by the circus that came to town and is showing off,” she said. “I haven’t seen anything good yet.”

 

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