ByteDance AI Video Update: Attack of the Off-Brand Movie Stars

🤖 ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 Is Terrifyingly Realistic

1. Although U.S. AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are grabbing all the tech headlines, China’s ByteDance has been quietly building what appears to be the best AI video tool currently available. Hollywood received a warning shot showing just how powerful ByteDance’s AI video was earlier this year with the launch of Seedance 2.0, which produced realistic versions of movie scenes featuring some of cinema’s biggest stars. Access to such infringing outputs was quickly nerfed, but the message was clear: Seedance 2.0 was best in class. This week, the company has released Seedance 2.5,and, somewhat shockingly, it looks even better than the previous version. The humans appear more realistic, and the dialogue flows more naturally from the lips of the simulated live-action characters.

Additionally, users can now generate 30 seconds of footage, effectively doubling what was possible in the previous version. The 2.5 version has also added Long Video Mode, which helps the user maintain video character and background consistency for up to three minutes per clip, a powerful tool for anyone attempting to make movies using Seedance. And for traditional VFX experts, 2.5 includes Dreamina AI plugins for Maya and Blender.

China Winning the AI Video War: Director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium, Chappie) recently showed off what he was able to accomplish with Seedance 2.0 via his trailer for Nightborne, a sci-fi horror short. And while the video currently has nearly equal Likes (9k) and Dislikes (8.4k) on YouTube, the short displayed how, in the hands of a traditional filmmaking professional, Seedance 2.0 is powerful. With the arrival of the much-improved Seedance 2.5, we’ll likely see more traditional directors begin to experiment with AI video in the coming months, despite the still simmering cultural backlash against it as old school auteurs like Christopher Nolan win the box office.

AI Star Power Without the Stars: I also noticed something interesting about the two Seedance 2.5 demo videos posted by ByteDance this week. The new videos deftly avoid image rights violations by featuring synthetic human characters that “almost” look like some of your favorite actors. In one case, the star of the AI video is a character that looks a lot like a mix of Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) and Matt Smith (Doctor Who, House of the Dragon). Which leads me to a new prediction. In the same way that grocery giants like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have built empires on store brands that mimic your favorite commercial food brands, I suspect that we’re about to see an AI video-powered wave of familiar faces in AI videos.

These “generic brand” amalgam faces will slickly blend the images of Scarlett Johansson and Charlize Theron, for example, to give you a Hollywood blonde actress archetype that feels incredibly familiar (and thus trusted by viewers), but potentially falls just short of violating the image rights of those actresses. I’m not sure even SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, will be able to effectively combat AI avatars that sorta, kinda, maybe could be, just might look vaguely like what two of your favorite actors’ baby would look like if you gave them a role in a new movie.

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🎬 Director Nicolas Winding Refn on AI’s Future

2. “I think AI is good for revolutionizing certain aspects of the medical industry or information, and certain access to information. At the same time, it’s messed with our already reconstructed reality. I’m concerned about it there very much. But as a creative tool, meaning just a brush, I’m very intrigued by it. But is it going to have consequences? Absolutely. Do I condemn those? Absolutely. Do I think it should be regulated? Absolutely. Does it need to be controlled by an outside body? Absolutely. I think it’s a government responsibility, the same way that the government offers water and the internet.”

—Nicolas Winding Refn, director, Drive, The Neon Demon

*Source: Variety

👨🏻‍💻 Snapchat Killed the AI Star?

3. While everyone prepares for the official launch of Evan Spiegel’s $2,195 Specsaugmented reality smartglasses on September 16, the Snapchat CEO has been busy with something else: canceling AI. Creators on Snapchat will no longer be paid for their viral AI creations via the platform’s Spotlight program. “As of this month and going forward, wholly AI-generated videos will no longer be eligible for recommendation on Spotlight,” today’s update revealed. “As low-quality, repetitive, AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet, we want Spotlight to remain a place where people can discover authentic creativity from real people, because we believe there’s enduring value in rewarding original perspectives, personal storytelling, and the moments that people choose to create and share themselves.”

Snap Decision?: This stance is particularly interesting coming from Snapchat given how much it has invested in AI-powered creation tools on its platform. In contrast, the new message here seems to be that AI-generated content isn’t original or personal, a perspective shared by many traditional video creators. However, this could just be playing to the current anti-AI sentiment, because at the end of its message, Snapchat buried an important caveat. “This is not about rejecting AI. We know that for some, AI plays an important part of the creative process.” When taken as a whole, the message seems to be: we don’t support AI content on Snapchat…for now.

🎭 First Facebook, Now He’s Aimed at Altman’s OpenAI

4. “I’m really grateful to Amazon for making the film with us, and I’m also really grateful to Amazon for helping it find a new home. And I think Neon’s a really, really exciting home for it. I think it’s a really good fit and I’m really excited to release it with them.”

—Andrew Garfield, actor, The Social Network/The Amazing Spider-Man, commenting on his role as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the upcoming Artificial movie and how Neon picked the film up after Amazon dumped it following an OpenAI deal.
*Source: Hollywood Reporter