As Hollywood uproar over new AI tool Seedance 2.0 continues to grow, the Walt Disney Company has reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, which launched the tool earlier this week.
According to news site Axios, the letter says ByteDance has stocked Seedance 2.0 with “a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.”
The letter adds: “Over Disney’s well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable.”
Disney believes that “this is just the tip of the iceberg – which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days,” the letter reportedly says.
At time of writing Disney had not responded to a request for comment.
Soon after Seedance 2.0 was made available on Thursday (February 12) the Motion Picture Association charged that the tool was engaging in copyright infringement on “a massive scale.”
Now performers union SAG-AFTRA has added its voice to the industry outcry, saying in a statement that it “stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by Bytedance’s new AI video model Seedance 2.0. The infringement includes the unauthorised 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. Responsible AI development demands responsibility, and that is nonexistent here.”
SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin is one of the actors whose image has appeared in clips generated by Seedance 2.0 and posted on social media sites, to the consternation of many industry professionals. The new deepfake clip spoofs the Lord of the Rings trilogy with AI versions of Astin and Elijah Wood as the characters they played in the films.
Also joining the alarm over the ByteDance tool has been the Human Artistry Campaign, whose member organisations include SAG-AFTRA, the Directors Guild of America and the European Writers’ Council.
In its statement the Campaign said: “The launch of Seedance 2.0 is an attack on every creator around the world. Stealing human creators’ work in an attempt to replace them with AI-generated slop is destructive to our culture: stealing isn’t innovation.
“These unauthorized deepfakes and voice clones of actors violate the most basic aspects of personal autonomy and should be deeply concerning to everyone,” the statement went on. “Authorities should use every legal tool at their disposal to stop this wholesale theft.”
ByteDance has not yet commented on the statements regarding Seedance 2.0.
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