“You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal! He was a good man!” Scene with two of the most famous actors in the world reopened the debate about the future of cinema in the age of AI.
The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) in video is reaching levels that were simply unimaginable half a dozen years ago.
In 2023, a scene of Will Smith trying to eat pasta went viral due to its strangeness: it seemed like something out of a nightmare, easily identified as fake. But everything changed. Today, AI-created images are convincing enough to confuse viewers into thinking they are real.
The most recent novelty came with the Seedance 2.0the new AI video generator from ByteDancethe Chinese company that owns TikTok.
Within a few days, hyperrealistic clips with alternative endings to series that never existed, spectacular scenes from never-before-filmed films and sequences that appear to be taken from major Hollywood productions (and with real actors!) began to circulate en masse on social media.
The video that shook Hollywood
The film industry’s new concern is a brief sequence in which digital versions of famous Brad Pitt e Tom Cruise they star in an intense action scene on top of a ruined building, with a visual finish that is reminiscent of a big-budget film.
The work IA was created by the Irish director Ruairi Robinson with the new version of Seedance, which quickly sparked concern among studios, unions and creators given the dizzying advancement of these tools.
And the scariest part? The following high-level clip, according to Robinson, was the result of a two-line instruction in Seedance 2.0: “maybe Hollywood is finished”, the director.
This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk.
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson)
Just watch the clip to see how far technology has changed. The difference from the first generations of AI-created video is huge. For many users, the result is so convincing that the only clue to an artificial origin is not the lack of technical realism, but the absurdity of some lines, as Robinson was keen to point out in other videos he created with the new AI.
In one of the confrontations that never happened, Pitt even shouted at Tom Cruise: “You killed Jeffrey Epstein, you animal! He was a good man!”
Jeffrey Epstein knew too much
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson)
The industry’s reaction was immediate. The screenwriter Rhett Reeseknown as Deadpool, confessed that the video gave him goosebumps and warned that tools like this could destroy jobs in the sectorrekindling the fears that already led to the 2023 screenwriters, when thousands of professionals demanded limits on the use of AI in Hollywood.
Users, as expected, immediately began experimenting with the new software. Within hours, alternative Game of Thrones endings were circulating on the Internet; new Dragon Ball Z fights; new scenes with Walter White, protagonist of Breaking Bad; even a new Will Smith facing off against a ferocious spaghetti monster, like in the first video in this article. Everything generated in a few minutes.
Disney and the battle for copyright
The public’s enthusiasm contrasts with the studios’ concern. The Motion Picture Association, which represents, among others, the interests of Disney, Universal, Warner and Netflix, accused ByteDance of allowing the unauthorized use of protected material “on a large scale” in a single day, according to statements collected by AFP.
The entity’s president, Charles Rivkin, stated that the service operates without sufficient guarantees against rights violations and demanded that the Chinese company put an end to these practices.
In response, ByteDance guaranteed to respect intellectual property and stated that it will reinforce protection mechanisms to prevent the misuse of protected images and content.
As a first measure, ByteDance said it had limited the possibility of generating clips with real people. But, as mentioned by , it remains to be seen how effective these restrictions will be — especially taking into account similar difficulties that OpenAI faces with Sora in controlling misuse on its own platforms.
Launch first, regulate later
Some sector analysts point out that, in the technology industry, a strategy is often repeated in which products with few restrictions are launched to generate media impact and attract users. The attempt to impose controls only comes later, when the tool has already gained popularity and presence in the market.
The Seedance 2.0 episode adds to a series of Chinese technological advances that surprised the North American market, following in the footsteps of , whose reasoning model competes with systems like ChatGPT. As tycoon Elon Musk summarized in X, when seeing one of the videos generated: “This is happening too fast”.
But the controversy doesn’t stop there. In addition to the use of real faces and believable scenes, Seedance 2.0 lets you control technical details like lighting, shadows and camera movement.
According to Swiss consultancy CTOL Digital Solutions, Seedance 2.0 is currently the most advanced video generation model on the marketsurpassing Sora, from OpenAI, and Veo, from Google, in different tests.
Still, not everyone is convinced. Heather Anne Campbell, executive producer and screenwriter of the cartoon Rick and Morty, said on social media that, despite the visual impact, nothing that has been produced so far is truly moving or creative, describing the phenomenon as a passing spectacle.
However, even those who doubt the artistic value recognize that the temptation to use these tools to reduce costs will be enormous. As Rhett Reese admitted, writing a script could end up being more expensive than ordering a script from a machine. And this is basically the fear that plagues Hollywood: that the advancement of these technologies will end up profoundly changing the way films are made, reducing the role of actors, cameras and even screenwriters in part of the creative process.
