What is Seedance? The Chinese AI app sending Hollywood into a panic

Major Hollywood groups have cried foul over Seedance’s use of copyrighted characters like Spider Man and Darth Vader. Disney and Paramount issued cease-and-desist letters demanding that Seedance stop using their content. Japan is also investigating ByteDance for alleged copyright violations, after AI videos of popular anime characters went viral.

ByteDance has said it was taking steps to “strengthen current safeguards”. This is not unique to the Chinese firm.

In 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they used its articles without permission to train their AI models. Reddit sued Perplexity last year, claiming the AI firm had illegally scraped user posts. Disney raised similar concerns with Google.

Clearly labelling content to prevent deception and building public trust in AI is far more important than “cooler-looking” videos, Mitchell says.

And that’s why developers must build systems that manage licensing and payments, and provide clear mechanisms for people to contest misuse, she adds.

Disney, for instance, signed a $1bn (£730m) deal with OpenAI’s Sora so it could use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel.

Seedance’s developers were likely to have been aware of potential copyright issues around the use of Western IP and took a risk anyway, says Shaanan Cohney, a computing professor at the University of Melbourne.

“There’s plenty of leeway to bend the rules strategically, to flout the rules for a while and get marketing clout,” he adds.

Meanwhile, for small firms, Seedance is too useful to ignore.

Kwok, from Singapore’s Tiny Island Productions, says AI of this quality will allow companies like his to create films that would cost far more than they can otherwise afford.

He gave the example of Asia’s booming short‑form videos and micro‑dramas that typically run on small budgets – roughly $140,000 for as many as 80 episodes under two minutes each.

These productions have been sticking to romance or family drama to keep costs down as they need fewer visual effects. But now AI can “elevate low-budget productions into more ambitious genres such as sci-fi, period drama and, now, action”, Kwok says.