CNN —
A stunning AI-generated video depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a rooftop brawl, Donald Trump facing off against kung fu masters in a bamboo forest, and Kanye West performing a Mandarin song in a Chinese imperial palace has gone viral, sparking anxiety about the rapidly evolving capabilities of artificial intelligence.
The videos, created using a latest AI tool called Seedance 2.0 developed by Chinese tech company ByteDance, have quickly captivated the internet with their cinematic quality and realistic imagery. The tool allows users to generate short scenes with polished characters and motion editing control at a significantly lower cost.
Though, the release of the videos quickly drew legal challenges. Paramount and Disney sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance, accusing the company of infringing on their intellectual property. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA too condemned the use of copyrighted American works without authorization.
ByteDance responded with a statement saying it would implement improved safeguards to protect intellectual property.
Seedance 2.0 has quickly become the most talked-about in a wave of AI models released by Chinese tech companies this year, as competition intensifies to dominate the artificial intelligence industry.
The Chinese government has made advanced technology a cornerstone of its national development strategy. During a televised celebration of the Lunar New Year this week, the country’s latest humanoid robots stole the show with demonstrations of martial arts, spinning kicks, and backflips.
These advancements are often met with concern, particularly in the United States, China’s primary technological and political rival, in a rivalry reminiscent of the 20th-century “space race” with the Soviet Union.
“There’s a kind of nationalist fervor around who will win the AI race,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “That’s part of what we see over and over again when these stories come out.”
Here’s why ByteDance’s latest technology has shaken the world.
While not yet publicly available to all, the AI video generation model has been hailed by many as the most sophisticated of its kind to date, utilizing images, audio, video, and text to quickly generate short scenes with polished characters and motion editing control at a lower cost.
“My glass half empty view is that Hollywood is about to be revolutionized/decimated,” wrote screenwriter and producer Rhett Reese, who worked on the Deadpool film franchise, on X after seeing the Cruise and Pitt video. The development underscores the growing anxieties within the entertainment industry about the potential impact of AI on creative jobs.
A Chinese tech blogger using Seedance 2.0 claimed it was so advanced it could generate realistic audio of his voice based solely on an image of him, raising fears about deepfakes and privacy. ByteDance subsequently removed that feature and introduced verification requirements for users who want to create digital avatars with their own images and audio, according to Chinese media reports.
Rogier Creemers, an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands who researches China’s technology policy, said part of the concern stems from the rapid pace at which Chinese companies have been releasing new iterations of AI technology this year.
That has also put China at a disadvantage when it comes to assessing the potential negative impacts of each improvement, he said.
“The more powerful these applications become, the more potentially harmful they become,” Creemers said. “It’s a bit like a car. If you build a car that can drive faster, it will get you where you need to be much faster, but it also means you can crash sooner.”
Following protests from Hollywood, ByteDance said in a statement that it respects intellectual property rights and will strengthen safeguards against the unauthorized use of intellectual property and images on its platform, though it did not specify how.
User complaints prompted ByteDance’s recent reversal and also led the popular Chinese Instagram-like app, RedNote, to restrict any AI-generated content that hasn’t been properly labeled.
And the arrival of Seedance 2.0 coincides with a tightening of regulations for AI content in China.
China’s regulation of AI nationally surpasses the efforts of most other countries in the world, in part due to its ingrained censorship apparatus. Last week, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced it was cracking down on unlabeled AI-generated content, penalizing more than 13,000 accounts and removing hundreds of thousands of posts.
However, restrictions on AI-generated content on the Chinese internet are often applied unevenly, wrote Nick Corvino in ChinaTalk, a newsletter specializing in China. Corvino attributed the problem in part to the difficulties of policing content across different applications, as well as the incentives for tech companies to encourage user content.
“With Chinese social media platforms caught in a fierce competition with each other and with the Western market, none want to be the strictest, while others let content flow freely,” he said in a post following the release of Seedance 2.0.
Analysts say China is walking a tightrope between fostering domestic development of AI models and maintaining strict controls over how those models are used.
“AI professionals have long said that what the Chinese government is doing is slowing down its development,” said Creemers, of Leiden University. “Obviously, a content control system like China’s, which basically limits production, is never nice.”
The pressure to stop using certain images or data, from American media giants or other sources, could also affect efforts to refine AI. Disney accused ByteDance of illegally using its intellectual property to train Seedance 2.0, but recently reached an agreement with the American company OpenAI to deliver Sora (OpenAI’s video generation model and competitor to Seedance) access to registered characters like Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
“These deals are a lot about the kind of data they’ll have access to, data that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, or that their competitors wouldn’t have access to,” said Srinivasan of UCLA. “There’s a high probability that Sora’s products will be more refined and advanced if the data is more suitable for the models to learn from.”
At the same time, restrictions on how AI can be used or trained could also stimulate further innovation, he said, pointing to how the Chinese company DeepSeek, blessed with a much smaller budget than industry leaders, built a competitive AI-powered chatbot.
“With respect to Chinese advances in AI, the unveiling of DeepSeek was very important because it showed there are other ways to train language models in more cost-effective ways,” he said.
