Disney is extremely mad at China's new plagiarism machine

Seedance generated a big dose of headlines when it debuted earlier this week, as a certain subset of the guileless watched it crap out videos that look like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt having a weightless, context-free fistfight in an anonymous cityscape and declared that, verily, Hollywood had met its creative match. Disney, meanwhile, mostly seems pissed that the Chinese company doesn’t appear to have done any work to filter out its characters from users’ ability to create videos and, indeed, seems to have trained the model so it knows exactly what a Spider-Man is. (To quote the suit: Seedance arrived “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.”) After all, what’s the point of signing a big billion-dollar licensing deal with OpenAI if any old AI company can come along and make Kylo Ren give Stewie Griffin a big friendly hug?

This does feel like a bit of a “no such thing as bad publicity” issue, though, as this week seemed to involve a pretty deliberate move from Chinese tech firms to demonstrate that their plagiarism machines are just as good as the American ones. In any case, response to Seedance from Hollywood has been loud and unhappy, as groups like the Motion Picture Association and the Human Artistry Campaign issued separate denunciations of the technology, with the latter group—a coalition that includes major Hollywood unions like SAG-AFTRA and the Director’s Guild—issuing a statement demanding that “Authorities should use every legal tool at their disposal to stop this wholesale theft.”