Text-to-video generating tools have made tremendous leaps in a few short years.
We went from a horrifying clip of actor Will Smith’s contorted face temporarily merging with a bowl of spaghetti in 2023 to a far more realistic clip of him enjoying a plate of pasta — including a soundtrack of unnerving squelching and chomping sounds — a mere two years later.
Now, TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance has once again upped the ante with the latest version of its Seedance AI video generating tool. It didn’t take long for photorealistic footage of “Lord of the Rings” clips, rapper Kanye West and ex-wife Kim Kardashian facing off in a dramatic Mandarin language movie scene, and of course Will Smith battling a ferocious spaghetti monster to go viral on social media.
The impressive technological feat appears to have shaken Hollywood, with “Deadpool” screenwriter Rhett Reese lamenting on X that “I hate to say it” but it’s “likely over for us.”
Reese was responding to a highly realistic clip of actors Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise engaging in hand-to-hand combat on top of a partially broken bridge.
The advent of powerful generative AI-based video tools has driven the entertainment industry into a panic, with actors warning that they could one day be replaced altogether. Highly influential voices in the industry have come out against the tech in full force, warning of the death of human agency and creativity.
As the BBC reports, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) was outraged that ByteDance’s latest tool was allowing people to generate clips of high-profile celebrities at all.
“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale,” the MPA’s chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.
In response, Bytedance claims to have stopped the ability to generate clips of real people. But given OpenAI’s continuing struggles with its own video-generating tool, it remains to be seen how effective the company’s approach to guardrails will turn out to be.
Beyond allowing users to generate ultra-realistic clips of celebrities, Rivkin also accused the company of allowing rampant copyright infringement.
“By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs,” he said, as quoted by the BBC. “ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activity.”
Others in the entertainment industry tend to agree.
“Everything I’ve seen from this model (Seedance 2) is a copyright violation,” Roblox product manager Peter Yang tweeted.
In short, the latest AI release once again highlights a highly contentious battle over copyright and the agency of human performers in an entertainment landscape that’s changing with each new AI release.
More on AI video generators: Google’s New Video-Generating AI May Be the End of Reality as We Know It
