Hollywood accuses Chinese AI Seedance of massive infringement
Seedance 2.0 has impressed the likes of Elon Musk and gone viral in China, where it has been compared to DeepSeek and praised for its ability to produce cinematic storylines from just a few prompts.
A Netflix sign is displayed atop a building in Los Angeles on Dec 18, 2025, with the Hollywood sign in the distance. (Photo: AP/Jae C Hong)
PARIS: America's Motion Picture Association (MPA) has accused Chinese video generation service Seedance of "unauthorised use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale" as lifelike AI-generated clips featuring Hollywood stars began flooding social media.
Built by TikTok owner ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 has produced scenes widely shared online, including Tom Cruise brawling with Brad Pitt or dozens of different combinations of lifelike stars from superhero movies and video games, some of them watched millions of times.
ByteDance's new AI "operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement" and "should immediately cease", MPA boss Charles Rivkin - representing heavyweights like Disney, Universal, Warner and Netflix - said in a statement published overnight from Thursday (Feb 12) to Friday.
Seedance 2.0 is for now only available as a limited test version in China.
That has not kept Hollywood-esque imagery from piling up in social media users' feeds.
"In a single day ... Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of US copyrighted works on a massive scale," Rivkin said.
ByteDance "is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs", he added.
SEEDANCE 2.0
Seedance 2.0 has already impressed the likes of Elon Musk and gone viral in China, where it has been compared to DeepSeek and won praise for its ability to produce cinematic storylines with just a few prompts.
While text-centric AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and DeepSeek's R1 have become widely adopted, models specialised in generating videos and pictures represent the next frontier in the technology's potential for disruption.
ByteDance, which officially unveiled Seedance 2.0 on Thursday, said in a statement that the system was designed for professional film, e-commerce, and advertising productions, because it was capable of processing text, images, audio, and video simultaneously, lowering the cost of creating content.
The product launch comes as China and investors around the world are on the lookout for a successor to Chinese startup DeepSeek's R1 and V3 models, whose global debut early in 2025 triggered a systemic shock.
On Chinese social media, Seedance 2.0 drew comparisons to DeepSeek's meteoric rise to fame.
"Early last year, the release of DeepSeek-R1 sparked heated debate in the US tech community over a 'Sputnik moment'," Chinese state-backed newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial on Wednesday.
"This year, the continued breakout success of Seedance 2.0 and similar innovations has gone even further, giving rise to a wave of admiration for China within Silicon Valley."
The buzz generated by Seedance 2.0 was underscored when the world's richest man Elon Musk replied to a post praising the model on his social media platform X by commenting: "It's happening fast."
Users on China's Weibo microblogging platform shared videos generated by the AI model that showcased the complexity and image quality of its output, no matter how bizarre the prompt.
One video, which had been viewed around a million times on Weibo, depicted rapper and record producer Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and reality TV star Kim Kardashian, as characters in a palace drama set in Imperial China, speaking and singing in Mandarin.
Hashtags related to Seedance 2.0 have racked up tens of millions of clicks on Weibo, including one from state-owned newspaper Beijing Daily that read "from DeepSeek to Seedance, China's AI has succeeded".
