ByteDance backpedals after Seedance 2.0 turned Hollywood icons into AI “clip art”

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Bongle

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It seems that with AI, making a movie will soon become like writing a book. We might soon be getting some fantastic movies instead of Marvel slop.
Has anyone ever bought, read, and enjoyed an AI-written book on purpose? I imagine the response will be similar to AI-written or AI-shot movies.

The recent 1776 historical drama had a significant budget and the involvement/sponsorship of video-model makers. And it still reviewed abysmally. Video models don't make editing, distribution, marketing, FX, or other labor free.
 
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terrydactyl

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The future, just substitute "sheep" with "content creators."
wolf-and-sheep-far-side-cartoon.jpg
 
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qchronod

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It seems that with AI, making a movie will soon become like writing a book. We might soon be getting some fantastic movies instead of Marvel slop.
Have you even read those AI books? The few that I've skimmed through were technically competent (i.e. grammar and spelling was good) but the story was an incoherent mess. It was like reading a dream journal where stuff happens for no reason and they contradicted things they said just paragraphs before.

This was ~1 year ago, so maybe they are more internally consistent now, but even then I don't really see the desire for them to get cranked out ad nauseum. There is plenty of stuff out there written by real people that there isn't really a hole in the market that we need the AI to fill.
 
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icrf

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This is the problem with all of these generative LLMs. They were trained on unauthorized copyrighted material. Full stop. They can try to tweak their prompts or outputs to exclude blatant violations and/or blame users in attempts to avoid lawsuits, but there would be no violations if they were ethically trained in the first place.

I understand that's hard and expensive and maybe not feasible, and the bad actors wouldn't bother anyway, so everyone "has" to do it. That's still the crux of the whole system, and there's no fixing it.
 
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Old money vs. new money, I guess it comes down to who's better friends with those in high places. My bet is on the AI companies, since there was a gay kiss in the background of a Disney movie once. At any rate, I'm not using any of this trash or watching anything that comes out of it if I have the choice. I don't have time to waste on "art" that no one took the time to make.
 
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Fatesrider

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“ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” Disney’s letter said.
After all, it's not like the Chinese government and its government led/compliant companies haven't been stealing the West's IP since 1972...
 
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It's remarkable how little the U.S. Congress is mentioned when Americans discuss intellectual property rights. Absent clear, up-to-date regulation, it's all "whoever has the biggest lawyers wins."

Our current IP framework is in large part based on assumptions that ceased to be applicable or in many cases even true decades ago. There's a debate about what can be owned, by whom, and for how long, that we refuse to have. There's a "let sleeping dogs lie" attitude that doesn't acknowledge the dogs have fleas and can do harm without waking up. Teleologically speaking, the current U.S. philosophy is "the rich own everything and everyone forever," including every thought, feeling, notion, idea, or design.
 
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people have been doing what AI did for ages, just less effectively - we all stand on the shoulders of giants, after all
Except when we cling to the backs of mediocrities, ill-considered compromises, and concessions made to predator parasite psychopaths. Below that is of course drowning in a depthless sea of short-sightedness, greed, and self-serving corruption. We do lots of that, too. Perhaps mostly that. Increasingly, the foundations of most human effort appear to rest on spoiled cheese.
 
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bugsbony

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You can’t write off something AI generated just because it “reviewed abysmally” as there is an absolutely massive number of people champing at the bit to criticize anything AI related. Let’s wait for the viewer numbers to see if non-reviewer-types actually want to watch it or not.
Most importantly, this is obviously early, maybe too early, for this tech, and just one attempt by one guy. even though he has real movie credentials.
This is like judging cinema's future based on the first movie ever made.

Sorry but thinking that you will never be able to do a good movie with AI is delusional. Though doing so using only text prompt might be hard, words can't express everything. I'll remind everyone that likes to reduce "made with AI" to "made with a text prompt", that you can use anything in addition to text prompt, pictures, videos, sounds...
 
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darkowl

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Even if you stick a little prompt gating in front of it, the model clearly has been trained on these works. It’s more obvious here than text because text relies on your reading interpretation, and while some stylistic flourishes can be ascertained, the sound, visuals and motion of a character or individual are far more concrete given intent to represent such.

If they can prove this, will there be consequences? Who knows. I’m sure Bytedance won’t want anyone looking at their training corpus, as all the players in this space would be similarly unwilling to allow.
 
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Balentius

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And remember - before you dismiss AI slop, look at Harlequin romance novels and the Transformer movies. There is obviously huge market for regurgitated stories in whatever format.

I think that it won't take long at all before a "decent" movie comes out that has a majority of its content created by AI, and except for critics is liked by a lot of people.
 
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ibad

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But this totally depends on human generated content. Everything it outputs is a derivative remix of sorts. It cannot really generate anything out of distribution... if this kills human artistry then we will be trapped in a loop of regurgitated crap forever. It will literally kill the goose that laid the golden egg, on which it depends.
 
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MouthBreathingTroglodyte

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Never wake up the House of Mouse.

While I’ll agree that the AI rip off is bad, I’m also seeing the irony in a company that has managed to manipulate copyright laws to control its IP.
And if China/Bytedance say "Meh, we'll just keep doing it." what leverage does Disney have? I dunno, seems like Disney needs China way more than China needs Disney, and there is nothing Disney could do to stop this even if they wanted to? Sue them for a quadrillion dollars in a court that they don't respect?
 
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But this totally depends on human generated content. Everything it outputs is a derivative remix of sorts. It cannot really generate anything out of distribution... if this kills human artistry then we will be trapped in a loop of regurgitated crap forever. It will literally kill the goose that laid the golden egg, on which it depends.
I hate to cite Star Trek as a source – because it's fiction – but their writers did call this, and anticipate solutions to it, back in the 1990s.

The holodeck of TNG, DS9, and Voyager is a logical extension of generative AI, as conceived long ago and beginning its implementation now. Short prompts were fed through a massive AI system to generate things the user could see and interact with.

Some people treated this system as an engineering R&D tool.

Some treated it as a game.

Some became addicted to it.

Some developed an artistic mastery of the technology and used it to tell and share stories of their own, even becoming galactically famous if their work touched a particularly poignant part of the meaning of life.

Some pushed it to the point where serious debates over the sentience and individuality of programs that grew beyond the originally-conceived limits of the technology could occur.

We aren't that far along yet. We're in the early days of "what is this? How does it work? What does it mean for our society?" and yes, there is a chance that some concepts that have been on shaky ground for a while – like copyrights on corporate IP, or the necessity of various administrative jobs – might be seriously disrupted. But it is still just a tool. A tool that will displace some jobs while rendering others more productive. A tool that will democratize some types of art and creativity while destroying the livelihoods of those who've built their careers in specialized fields.

The genie is out of the bottle now, though, and we have to hope that he turns into Vic Fontaine rather than Professor Moriarty.
 
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GFKBill

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The video I saw was excellent according to my Action Movie loving senses. The next step is AI generated characters based on an amalgamation of public domain media.

Then make fully genAI movies/videos with that character; and spend almost zero dollars on human staff. That is the dream of the studio execs, and this tech is going to let people bypass the studios.

I can absolutely envision a not to distant future where script writers are using screenplays as prompts for full length genAI films. Followed by the prompts becoming simpler and simpler.
A lot of downvotes going on for comments like yours, which suggests there are a lot of readers here who aren't really keeping up with how damn fast these AI video generations tools are progressing, both in quality and speed (ie energy use).

Like it or not, there is no question that it will not be long before it is indeed possible to turn out at the least a decent short film with this stuff. That's not to belittle the concerns about IP theft and job losses, but sticking our head in the sand and claiming it's not going to happen is naive.
 
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ampet

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And remember - before you dismiss AI slop, look at Harlequin romance novels and the Transformer movies. There is obviously huge market for regurgitated stories in whatever format.

I think that it won't take long at all before a "decent" movie comes out that has a majority of its content created by AI, and except for critics is liked by a lot of people.
I'd go further than that.

I'm an English teacher. I do translations as a side job, mostly because they ask me to. Local businesses and stuff. I hate doing translations. It's one of the most mind-numbingly boring tasks I can think of. It pays decently, but I still dread having to do them. (I could refuse, but the money does come in handy). Of course, these last few years have been easier with AI assisting me with the task. At the same time, I get fewer requests, which I'm happy about, but not because the "quality" of the requested translations has risen on average. Noooooohohoho. It's just that now all I'm doing is either mind-numbingly boring copy for slightly bigger companies with more structure (as opposed to, dunno, restaurant menus?) or legal stuff for real estate dealings. Stuff that AI could do even "better" than me (until it makes some weird mistake or phrasing choice I have to correct). It's not like advertising copy is the pinnacle of human creation. Those who are asking AI to translate menus instead of me are making a smaller number of mistakes/weird choices than those who were cheap enough to use Google Translate back when it was utter shite.

A fun anecdote: a local business making milkshakes and smoothies had its menu posted out of the door. Here below is a photo for you to peruse and enjoy. At most, AI has robbed us of this kind of amusement.

https://i.postimg.cc/J0v2bL2g/FB-IMG-1771278229810.jpg

"Finocchio" is also Italian for "fennel". But also that other thing.

I'm also a musician. Many musicians fear and loathe AI. I don't. A lot of the music in the charts (and not in the charts) is repetitive slop with more production value than musical value. I'm not saying this as a boomer rant. This was equally true twenty, forty, sixty, etc. years ago. If anything, AI music generation may pose less of a hurdle for, say, a talented lyricist (but maybe a not-so-talented musician... or someone without a group of talented musicians to support him or her) to at least get a foot out of the door. At worst, the result will be mediocre. At best, it might be a first step towards making better music. What's there to hate?
 
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A lot of downvotes going on for comments like yours, which suggests there are a lot of readers here who aren't really keeping up with how damn fast these AI video generations tools are progressing, both in quality and speed (ie energy use).

Like it or not, there is no question that it will not be long before it is indeed possible to turn out at the least a decent short film with this stuff. That's not to belittle the concerns about IP theft and job losses, but sticking our head in the sand and claiming it's not going to happen is naive.
It costs an average of $18,000,000 to make a Hollywood film these days. Films with a large all-star cast and a lot of visual effects often run ten or twenty times that amount.

Making a movie, with the production values and VFX necessary to fully illustrate the writer-director's vision, is completely beyond the reach of the vast majority of independent writer-directors.

Their stories will never be told the way they want them to be. They simply can't afford it.

Unless AI changes that and gives them the tools to explore and share their visions.

It's disruptive, yes. But it's not all downside. I know a lot of people who are very excited about being able to do, in the next 2 to 5 years, things that they've been told for decades are "too risky, too different, simply not worth the studio's funding."
 
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ItchyPoo

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Most importantly, this is obviously early, maybe too early, for this tech, and just one attempt by one guy. even though he has real movie credentials.
This is like judging cinema's future based on the first movie ever made.

Sorry but thinking that you will never be able to do a good movie with AI is delusional. Though doing so using only text prompt might be hard, words can't express everything. I'll remind everyone that likes to reduce "made with AI" to "made with a text prompt", that you can use anything in addition to text prompt, pictures, videos, sounds...
For me the point is not that someone wont be able to create something good using ai. I would bet money on good content creation. For me the question is, do I want to sift though 100, 1000, 1,000,000 times more media content to find something good?

I read an article about some lady that was using chatgpt to create romance novels in about an hour and then self publishing on Amazon. Supposedly already about 5,000 under many different pen names and also is teaching courses in how to do it. Yuck.

Edit typo
 
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