Welp, Hollywood is still going on a tangent with the recent (and continued) wave of more A.I. fabrications of the beloved content circling the Internet. All the major studios, including Disney, Warner Brothers, Netflix, and more, have sent cease-and-desist letters and are threatening to sue ByteDance for copyright infringement and the theft of intellectual property.
Oh, and the company unveiled Seedance 2.0, which is responsible for the notoriously good video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, which we covered a month ago.
According to Neil Shah, a co-founder of Counterpoint, “For the West, [Seedance 2.0] raises alarm bells as it erodes into conventional film production, challenging the cost and profit structure [of the industry]…There is still a considerable gap between the pace of law and [the development of] generative AI technology, which makes it very difficult to set boundaries with respect to licensing and copyright.”
We’ve already borne witness to Superman fighting Thanos and Jinx, alternate endings to Titanic and Game of Thrones, and a music video in which Kanye West sang in Chinese. More and more crossovers are appearing on a daily basis, with characters fighting in action scenes looking more realistic than the next.
And the technicalities of the U.S.’s primary film studios suing overseas companies will be an excruciating process overall. Professor Angela Zhang commented, “AI is powerful and dangerous at the same time, and geopolitics — especially U.S. and China competition — adds pressure and complexity.”
This might reek of a desperation play by Hollywood executives, but it’s in line with the broader discussion about how artificial intelligence has already been rolling out across social media and major brand websites to entice viewers into the discussion of what is real or not. And overseas box office performance has been rather murky for years for big Hollywood titles.
It’s not a good sign for Hollywood studios and blockbusters; the battle over the use of artificial intelligence (and copyright laws) in filmmaking may go on for years.
