No, Disney didn’t launch footage of a never-before-seen battle sequence between Marvel’s Wolverine and Thanos (spoiler: Thanos gained).
That clip, which amassed over 142,000 views on X over 48 hours, was created utilizing Seedance 2.0, an AI video era mannequin that ByteDance debuted final week. The software created a buzz on social media, the place one consumer made a hyperrealistic AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt preventing over Jeffrey Epstein.
ByteDance’s determination to let customers create content material primarily based on Disney’s IP with out permission is not all that shocking given the AI trade’s well-established technique to “express regret, not permission.”
Disney, which is notorious for aggressively defending its mental property, is not having it — although the way it responds to the threats shouldn’t be at all times the identical.
On Friday, the leisure firm despatched ByteDance, the Chinese language firm that owns Seedance and TikTok, a cease-and-desist letter, a supply accustomed to the matter confirmed for Enterprise Insider.
Within the letter, Disney accused ByteDance of supplying Seedance 2.0 with “a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and different Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted mental property have been free public area clip artwork.”
“Over Disney’s well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating spinoff works that includes these characters,” the letter stated.
Seedance is simply the newest AI firm Disney says is ripping it off.
Disney and NBCUniversal sued Midjourney, an AI picture generator, in June final 12 months. Within the lawsuit, the businesses in contrast Midjourney’s tech to “a digital merchandising machine, producing limitless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Common’s copyrighted works.”
Then Disney accused Character.AI of copyright infringement in a September cease-and-desist letter final September. In December, it despatched one to Google in response to the AI picture generator Nano Banana Professional and its different AI fashions, accusing the Massive Tech large of stealing its IP on a “large scale.” Each firms have since eliminated Disney characters from their platforms.
Disney shouldn’t be anti-AI, nonetheless, and its technique shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. The corporate took a a lot much less adversarial method with OpenAI, the world’s main AI startup.
When OpenAI debuted Sora 2, an AI-powered text-to-video platform, in September, customers started importing IP-heavy content material that includes Disney characters to social media. As an alternative of a cease-and-desist letter or authorized motion, although, Disney negotiated a deal.
By December, Disney and OpenAI had introduced a three-year licensing settlement that provides Sora customers, with some guardrails, entry to 200 Disney characters. As a part of the deal, Disney would additionally make investments $1 billion in OpenAI.
Though Disney hasn’t shared plans to develop its personal AI mannequin or video generator, Disney CEO Bob Iger stated the corporate in the end sees the tech not as a menace however as a brand new path to attach with audiences.
Throughout an earnings name late final 12 months, he stated AI would “present customers of Disney+ with a way more engaged expertise, together with the power for them to create user-generated content material, and to devour user-generated content material, principally brief kind, from others.”
