Great job, Internet!: Hollywood uncooked as viral Cruise vs. Pitt video looks like another AI con-job

If any readers are standing, they might want to sit down. Reports of Hollywood being cooked by AI may have been a bit premature. Last week, a video of supposedly digitally-generated Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise avatars fighting on a rooftop caused Oscar-nominees and Marvel screenwriters alike to declare their business “cooked” and their careers “over.” The initial claim from Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson was that the video was made via a two-line prompt into ByteDance’s latest plagiarism app, Seedance 2.0. Unsurprisingly for those who watched AI companies beg people to use their money-hemorrhaging, power-ciphoning software during the Super Bowl, the video may be another AI grift. As TV writer David Slack noted on Bluesky, the whole thing was, as this writer surmised in our initial report, just some digital reskinning of human-performed fight choreography. Once again, for those in the back, thus far, the only things that AI generates are CSAM, misinformation, and hype. 

Slack points to a blog post by writer and software developer Aron Peterson, who has debunked several AI videos on his website, Shokunin Studio. A post-production professional with years of on-set experience, Peterson wrote that he had to call bullshit on the video because other Seedance demos “had the usual errors we have come to expect from AI video generators.” Why was the Pitt and Cruise video different? “Being the enthusiastic fact checker I hopped over to Seedance’s website and it only took 10 seconds to find green screen footage of two stuntmen performing the same fight choreography we see in the Cruise vs Pitt scene,” he writes. “Seedance had used the green screen footage for a different demo – this time using a prompt for an anime style fight scene.”