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ByteDance's Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt (yahoo.com) 52

Posted by EditorDavid from the final-reckoning dept.
1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance's new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.

But while ByteDance gushes their tool "delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards," the cinema industry isn't happy, reports the Los Angeles Times reports: Charles Rivkin, chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn., wrote in a statement that the company "should immediately cease its infringing activity."

"In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale," wrote Rivkin. "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."

The video was posted on X by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson. His post said the 15-second video came from a two-line prompt he put into Seedance 2.0. Rhett Reese, writer-producer of movies such as the "Deadpool" trilogy and "Zombieland," responded to Robinson's post, writing, "I hate to say it. It's likely over for us." He goes on to say that soon people will be able to sit at a computer and create a movie "indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases." Reese says he's fearful of losing his job as increasingly powerful AI tools advance into creative fields. "I was blown away by the Pitt v Cruise video because it is so professional. That's exactly why I'm scared," wrote Reese on X. "My glass half empty view is that Hollywood is about to be revolutionized/decimated...."

In a statement to The Times, [screen/TV actors union] SAG-AFTRA confirmed that the union stands with the studios in "condemning the blatant infringement" from Seedance 2.0, as video includes "unauthorized use of our members' voices and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood. Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards and basic principles of consent," wrote a spokesperson from SAG-AFTRA. "Responsible A.I. development demands responsibility, and that is nonexistent here."
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ByteDance's Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt More

ByteDance's Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt

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  • This may sound a bit crude, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fuck all these jokers.

    Is there an actual good guy in the mix here?

    We have absolute scum Hollywood corporate suits vs the worst of "tech bro" hedonism.

    Let them fight.

    • Let them fight.

      Exactly. I don't like either of them.

    • Perhaps a new form of reality TV will develop - "lawyer smackdown" where we follow the lawyers indirectly feeding on the greed of investors in various industries? Think Jimmy McGill with more coke.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        It'll be pretty boring thought because the "lawyers" will be AI bots.

    • Fuck all these jokers.

      Is there an actual good guy in the mix here?

      We have absolute scum Hollywood corporate suits vs the worst of "tech bro" hedonism.

      Let them fight.

      Watching high dollar junkies fight each other has become the new gladiatorial sport for us plebes. They're the only ones that have any possibility of causing harm to one another, and us little pissants quite enjoy when they start smacking each other around. You are 100% correct in your last statement. Let them fight. And let us rejoice in the bleeding of value as they do so.

  • I hate to say it. It's likely over for us." He goes on to say that soon people will be able to sit at a computer and milk a franchise to death without industry involvement

  • Well, you are using people's image without permission, to promote your service.

  • the cinema industry isn't happy,

    Future post:
    Industry makes 'campaign contributions' to have its 'right' to on-demand pony-delivery codified in law.

  • Change it around a bit (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @03:58PM (#65989150)
    Have Xi fighting Winnie the Pooh and see how quickly it gets regulated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      I heard it works pretty well in the downloadable versions (I don't have the hardware to have much fun with video). The guardrails are in the frontends, not in the models for Chinese stuff.

  • I am anti copyright and have been all my life. I have created things of value and always dump them into the public domain.

    Copyright infringes our rights to use our brain and voice and hands and body.

    Fuck IP.

    • I think it is interesting that you got a troll mod, given the popularity of such notions as "sharing is caring" here on slashdot.

      It may be that we are progressing into a copyright-free world, and are just beginning to feel the growing pains that come with that adjustment.

      It is popularly believed that copyright benefits the independent creator since it gives them legal protection against big corporations who would violate that copyright, but this has been repeatedly disproved, especially recently with big-an

      • Slashdot comments on the issue of IP have certainly changed, but then again napster never threatened a post-truth world.

        This particular AI fake is really of the less offensive variety. It shows two actors portrayed in a manner that is typical for them. And even when getting the big paychecks they still use CGI. Whereas the existence of factual / political fakery is really problematic. And then there's "non-consensual intimate imagery."

    • I am anti copyright and have been all my life. I have created things of value and always dump them into the public domain.

      Copyright infringes our rights to use our brain and voice and hands and body.

      Fuck IP.

      That is your choice. You're the one who decided what to do with YOUR work.

      Telling everyone else what they can do with what THEY created is not how it works.

      • That is your choice. You're the one who decided what to do with YOUR work.
        Telling everyone else what they can do with what THEY created is not how it works.

        Either way rights of individuals are being constrained by the states threat of violence. Whether it is the right for people to perform, reproduce or generate derivatives of works they encounter or the right to retain control of works you disclose publicly the state is restricting the freedoms of individuals. There is no preferential direction here that works one way but not the other here. It is only a balancing of competing interests thru the lens of subjective sensibilities of society.

  • We already say that match up back in 1998 [imdb.com]. And Brad Pitt v. Keanu Reeves back in 1999 [imdb.com]. What a time to be alive!

    I think in the AI generated video that the 4 inch height difference between the two men was not as apparent as it should be. Perhaps Cruise is in platforms?

    • yes the whole scene is very much one that occur in a real film. Just not without paying a whole lot of $$$

      And if it does happen, I suspect the AI's prediction of heightening will be prescient : )

  • Turnabout fair play? Create "uncomfortable" videos using the likeness of the creators of these copyright violating vids. See how they react to hundreds or thousands of fake videos portraying them doing all sorts of things or participating in all sorts of activities.

  • When OpenAI stole Studio Ghibli's look
    • Are the stealing the style or the specific characters? I know trademark can protect the former in some circumstances, but this Cruise / Pitt video certainly passes the second line as well.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      I am pretty sure they agreed on that mutually.
      A few days before ChatGPT was refusing to do anything that specifies a known artstyle and had prompts like "If you are asked to draw a popular person, first generate a description and then generate using the description". Then boom Ghibli style popularized by their CEO himself. I am pretty sure that was a marketing stunt for both.

  • If it can be done it will be done.

    The choice is do you want to ride the train or be left standing at the station when it's gone?

    If movies can be made this way, and if they are "good", and if people will watch them, then they will be made this way.

    We already have some virtual movie stars, virtual bands, and virtual singers.

  • "The Barbara Streisand Effect will increase the viral potential of your movie. Instead of making a regular clip from The Golden Girls, this new feature will replace the women with Golden Grahams to meet a younger target audience."

    (BTW, this idea is copyrighted by me. It can't be used to train AI.)

  • The positive outcome is that within the next few years, this can of quality will be available to interested amateurs.

    Of there'll be quite a lot of trash (usual proportion of any creative medium, I imagine, so around 90%), but we may yet see things like Star Wars redeemed.

    I can't be the only one who would like to watch a good adaptation of Zahn's trilogy?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Some of the AI Stormtrooper Vlogs were better than anything official Star Wars has produced in decades. Which is probably why they got the videos removed from Youtube.

      They're just worried that some guy in his bedroom can now produce better movies than billion-dollar corporations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      What will happen is that this level of quality will become uninteresting to everyone, because its ubiquity will devalue it and it will become associated with "cheap AI slop". So even if a movie company does go to the trouble of making an action movie with intense fight sequences, it won't get a lot of viewership. Why buy a movie ticket for that, when you can see infinite variations of the same thing at home for free? As Syndrome put it, "when everyone is special, no one is".

      What will likely become value

  • "ByteDance's Seedance 2 Criticized" (Score:3)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @05:54PM (#65989294)
    Erm, what ?!

    They criticized a TOOL for what it was used to create ?
    Rather than the people who ran the tool and asked it to create something they don't like ?

    Should we criticize guns for all the school massacres ? BAD GUNS !

  • I can see why they are worried, but not impressed. (Score:4, Informative)

    by tragedy ( 27079 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @06:15PM (#65989332)

    Actually bothered watching the movie. It looks really fake. Polished, but really fake. Of course, that just means that it looks very much like the kind of boring, canned fight choreography you would expect in many big budget films where the script itself basically says "insert fight scene here", so I can see why an MPA/MPAA CEO would be worried. Oh, and my heart truly, truly weeps for them, really. Basically, if an extraordinarily generic fight scene generated from recycled crap with different actors faces pasted on makes them worried, I think that demonstrates a lot about what they think about the art of film making.

    There is a decent point in there though. One that should be considered by any of the big businesses trying to replace all of their employees with AI (and that includes the big AI companies looking at valuations in the hundreds of billions or even in the trillions), and that is that is that spread of this technology really can lead to a future where these big money industries that centralize all this power and control can end up obsolete. Of course, as they realize this, that could mean that they see that the world is changing and realize that new ways of doing things are coming. Small creators in their homes will be able to do most of what they can do, so they need to provide something better or be irrelevant. For the AI companies, the computing power and resources for AI could sit on people's desktops, in their handheld devices, etc. working directly for people and using public repositories of knowledge not controlled by anyone (I mean, not current "AI" necessarily, but some future AI) and not controlling them, tracking all of their personal details to commercialize them, etc. They could see that. More likely though, they will see that now is the time to use their existing power, control, and wealth to lock things in so that they can extract rents from us forever.

    So, just a bit more on the video. Amazingly generic. Fight on a rooftop with cityscape in the background. Lots of posing, extremely basic fighting moves cribbed from other fight scenes. I could swear that last kick was ripped right out of a Chuck Norris movie from about forty years ago. They start by running at each other in a long shot, then slowing and basically winding up fro a punch in extremely generic fight choreography. The motion is choppy, the faces are blurry, mask-like, and a little distorted, which is hidden by the jerky motion. The fight moves are just a bunch of pretty basic punches and blocks except for that last kick and block. There's a punch at about 0:10 where Cruise punches (connects? misses? doesn't seem like it makes a difference to the other guys face), doesn't withdraw his arm, then Pitt blocks his arm, then makes another move to deflect it (an arm that's just held out pointlessly after the punch) after the punch. That last kick at the end, there was too much distance between them for it to have much of a chance of contact. For the majority of their punches, in fact, they weren't closing. Basically, this wasn't just a fake AI generated fight, it was an fake AI generated fake fight. The fighting was all the kind of choreography that Hollywood uses for closeup shots of multimillion faces fighting, where the faces are too precious for real fighting moves, but they really want to show the action hero faces.

    I don't know. Someone else might have a different opinion on it, but it mostly seems like crap to me. A threat to Hollywood crap sure, but still crap. Of course, at this point I am tempted to tell everyone to get off my lawn, so take with a grain of salt.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Yes. It's AI slop doing a very good recreation of Hollywood slop.

    • Here is what I think is Hollywood's worst case scenario...

      Pirates take a newly released movie and run it through an AI program to make a script.
      Pirates post the script online.
      User downloads script and makes subtle changes if they like.
      User loads up an AI program which reads the script. AI asks questions in order to make an accurate rending.
      AI even has the feature to change any of the actors in the film.
      Start program before you go to bed.
      Come home after work and movie is done. It's even paced to have the sam

  • Oh wait, I know the issue here. It's rich people that are being affected now. People who make propaganda people who gate keep media. The rest of us can get replaced by automation just fine. Maybe if we're lucky they'll print trillions of dollars, give us a basis income, and give us seed oil slop and printed chicken to buy it with.

  • They should be thrilled at the though of not paying actors. They have gold mines in their collection of audition tapes they could use to generate virtual performers with no pay, no residuals, no union bullshit. They should be funding this not fighting it. Just think of all they could do with the extra profits!

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