China's Bytedance responds to Disney's legal notice; says: We are ...

ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant behind TikTok, has responded to the cease-and-desist letter sent by Disney which accused the Chinese company of training its AI on a “pirated library” of copyrighted material. In the response, Bytedance said that it is working to add safety filters to its new AI video generator. On Monday (February 16), the company promised to take “firm steps” to stop users from creating unauthorised videos of famous movie characters and celebrities. The reply comes soon after it was hit with legal warnings from major Hollywood studios.“We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users,” ByteDance said in its statement, according to a report by news agency Reuters.The whole controversy surrounds Seedance 2.0, a new AI tool released last week. The model quickly went viral in China for its “cinematic” quality, with users began generating high-quality clips of everything from Marvel superheroes to fake fights between stars like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. These videos not only caught caught the attention of people but also of US lawyers.Disney’s main complaint is that Seedance 2.0 appears to treat iconic characters like Spider-Man and Darth Vader as if they were free “clip art” available for public use. Disney isn’t the only studio upset. Paramount Skydance has also sent a legal notice, accusing ByteDance of “blatant infringement” of its intellectual property, according to Variety (via Reuters) These studios are moving quickly to protect their ‘crown jewels’.It is to be noted that this is not the first time that Hollywood Studios has sent such warnings to tech companies.In December, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI signed an official licensing deal with Disney. This allows their Sora video tool to legally use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel. Similarly, Disney recently took similar legal action against Character.AI to stop users from chatting with unauthorised versions of its characters.