Disney Just Sent ByteDance a Legal Threat Over an AI Tool That Can Make Tom Cruise Fight Brad Pitt
Seedance 2.0 went viral by generating scarily realistic videos of celebrities. Hollywood is not amused.
ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, released an AI video generator called Seedance 2.0 last week. Within days, it went massively viral because users could type a short text prompt and get realistic video clips of real celebrities doing whatever they wanted.
We're talking Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt. Marvel superheroes in scenes that were never filmed. Star Wars characters in completely new scenarios. All generated by AI in seconds.
Hollywood freaked out.
On Friday, Disney sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter accusing them of training Seedance on a "pirated library" of Disney's copyrighted characters, including Marvel and Star Wars properties. Several other major studios have piled on with similar accusations.
ByteDance has now promised to "curb" the tool, but the damage is already done. Millions of these AI-generated celebrity videos are already circulating online.
This is the first real legal showdown between a major AI video tool and Hollywood. And it raises a question that nobody has a good answer to yet. If an AI can generate a perfectly realistic video of any celebrity doing anything, who owns that? Who's liable? And how do you put that genie back in the bottle?
SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union, has already reacted with outrage. Expect this to get a lot uglier before it gets resolved.
As reported by The Guardian and BBC News.
Source: The Guardian
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