ByteDance is not only the company responsible for TikTok: This is a conglomerate that is pushing the development of artificial intelligence in China. And a few weeks ago they presented a Video generation AI which was the most brutal thing we had seen: Seedance 2.0. He perfectly matched any animated character, but also to flesh and blood actors. The West was quick to react, raising its voice and arguing “what happens to my copyrights.”
And, in the background, there is something more important: one more chapter in the technological power struggle between China and the rest of the world.
In short. Seedance 2.0 is a multimodal AI that allows us to generate video from text, images and other video chips. With a single promptAI takes care of the rest, combining video, audio and visual effects that can be extremely realistic. During the days following the announcement we were able to see a multitude of examples that showed a level of “perfection” not previously seen in other video models.
“China is coming”. And the problem is what you are imagining: to recreate a photorealistic Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, he has evidently been inspired by those in the flesh. Also in the Douyin’s inexhaustible librarythe Chinese TikTok, which allowed him a complex understanding of facial and physical expressions and lighting calculations in a multitude of situations. My colleague Lacort already said it: This is not “China is coming”, but rather “China already does this… and we don’t”.
Hollywood picks up the phone. And of course, just like the Japanese industry did when OpenAI blatantly copied his works so that we could create our Ghibli-style dog in ChatGPT, the American film industry was quick to raise its voice. One of the first was Disney, which in the purest Nintendo stylesent a cease and desist letter to ByteDance, accusing the Chinese company to use Disney characters to train your model.
Disney is bothered by this threat, but it bothers it more that it doesn’t get a cut like it does from its alliance with OpenAI. Days later it was Motion Picture Association (to which Netflix, Amazon Prime, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Warner or Disney belong) which sent the same letter of interruption of operations to the Chinese company, accusing it of using its characters and protected material to train the model. And it has had consequences.
Putting on the brake. In China, Seedance 2.0 remains operational, where it has achieved a high degree of virality among users, but where it also serves as a tool for creators. ByteDance planned to open global access in mid-March, but due to threats from the Western film industry, have put those fallow plans.
“We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users” – ByteDance’s response
Disney has surely seen this video:
Geopolitical pulse. It is not known how or when Seedance 2.0 will be launched outside of China, but in the background there is something very interesting: the use of copyright as a weapon in the technological war. If this has already gone from “the wolf is coming” to “the wolf is already here”, the West is using its available weapons to stop the advance.
We have been following the technological and trade war between the United States for years (dragging Europe) and China, and if this movement implies another movement in the current geopolitical game in which the two poles are developing their AI by leaps and bounds. And China is achieving it without having the same resources at hand as the US AI Big Tech. Seedance is estimated to have been built without NVIDIA H100 chips banned for China, some that its rivals do have.
Precedents. Is something similar to what happened with DeepSeek in LLMs And now it’s happening with synthetic video: the US has tried hard to leave China out of the conversation, but they are managing to have a strong presence in it. Another example is the reverse engineer ASML machines o what SMIC and Huawei are making progress in building cutting-edge chips.
Capacity vs regulation. And another important theme of the ‘Seedance case’ is that it has become an example of the head-on collision between the technical capacity of AI and the regulatory power of the industry. It’s funny that when it became known that the American AI had ‘borrowed’ the entire Internet to train their models, other industries would be more lukewarm than when a Chinese company does it.
And at the center of it all is a European Union that is expressing its intention to bring some sanity to progress for the sake of progress, overriding copyrights that can be trampled depending on who does it. In a proposal to “protect creative work with copyright in the age of AI, the European Parliament requires a series of measures so that companies pay for the resources they need for technology training.
According to these companies, such a measure would go against progress and smaller AI companies. It would be curious if ByteDance responded to Disney with that same argument.
In Xataka | All the big AIs have ignored copyright laws. The amazing thing is that there are still no consequences
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