It shows how fast-paced the world is right now, given that I completely forgot this video generator was being rolled out. This is the one that had Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fight, and made Hollywood so mad because of all the blatant copyright violations taking place with the video generator.

In the letter to the ByteDanceCEO, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch stated that Seedance 2.0

“is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs.”

And honestly, they are not wrong. It was clear what the model was trained on, as the Disney characters' IP and other widely known IPs were also readily available (earning ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter from them as well). The introduction went so badly that ByteDance had to pause its global rollout of this tool because, while they claim it had guardrails, they didn't do anything to prevent it from being used to create new videos featuring well-known IPs like Stranger Things.

This is the type of sloppy release that is going to get Congress to act and pass some super crappy, rushed piece of legislation that, as soon as it is passed, we are going to look back at it and go, "Why on God's green earth did we pass that?" Tech companies, and especially those in the AI space, have to realize that unless they want some wild, draconian legislation passed that is going to have immeasurable impacts on their development, they cannot be so sloppy with their releases. A company from China, like ByteDance, is just such an easy target that it is shocking to me that they would fumble as badly as they did here.