Welcome to Rendering, a Deadline column reporting at the intersection of AI and showbiz. Rendering examines how artificial intelligence is disrupting the entertainment industry, taking you inside key battlegrounds and spotlighting change makers wielding the technology for good and ill. Got a story about AI? Rendering wants to hear from you: [email protected].
Want to see Kim Jong Un gatecrashing Dunder Mifflin, or Darth Vader decapitating Ross Geller? Simply head over to X/Twitter, and you will find AI bros hungrily feeding beloved characters into their newest meatgrinder, and posting inanely about Hollywood being “cooked.”
This cycle happens nearly every time a new AI model is released. This week, I was fully expecting Seedance 2.5 to be the story. The ByteDance video generator has been eagerly awaited by people in the AI community following the shock-and-awe of Seedance 2.0, which wowed creators and horrified IP owners in equal measure.
But Seedance 2.5 was not the story. Instead, the AI bros have been marveling at Hailuo 3, released by MiniMax, another player in China’s booming artificial intelligence industry. MiniMax H3 is not available directly to users in the U.S. or the European Union, but this has not stopped it from going viral outside of China through third-party access.
Justine Moore, a partner at tech investor Andreessen Horowitz, generated a clip of Dwight and Jim from The Office using a simple H3 text prompt in Krea, an online studio that gives users access to various generative AI models in one place. Her text prompt still went through MiniMax’s servers, meaning Moore’s video suggests that copyright safeguards are not being properly enforced.
And this is happening at a time when MiniMax is defending a lawsuit from Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros., in which the studios allege that Hailuo “pirates and plunders copyrighted works on a massive scale.” In their suit, they even point to MiniMax promoting the model using AI videos of Deadpool, Wolverine, and The Joker on its official YouTube account. This is not subtle stuff. MiniMax denies the allegations in its defense, but the superhero videos have been quietly scrubbed from its YouTube account.
MiniMax did not respond to a request for comment. When launching H3, a company representative said the full model would not be available in the U.S. because of “ongoing copyright-related legal proceedings specifically concerning generative video AI.”
The fact that Seedance 2.5 has not been used to mine Hollywood gold to the same extent indicates that ByteDance has raised its rail guards following the chaos of Seedance 2.0. You will remember that Seedance 2.0 produced the wildly viral Tom Cruise vs Brad Pitt deepfake fight. Netflix, Disney and others fired off cease and desist letters, and ByteDance (which also owns TikTok) promised to do better.
That’s not to say ByteDance models are clean. VN.ai, a startup that stress tests generative artificial intelligence tools for copyright infringement, was this week able to generate bootleg pictures of Elsa, Shrek, and Buzz Lightyear through ByteDance image creator Seedream 5.0, per research reports seen by Deadline’s Rendering column.
VN.ai did this through a third-party API, meaning the safeguards may not have been as robust as on ByteDance’s own service. VN.ai also found that prompts for high-profile characters were often denied, but that by tweaking requests — such as asking for exact pixel sizes — Seedream 5.0 did then produce a recognizable rendering of Buzz Lightyear. This is known as “red teaming” in the tech industry, where researchers purposefully try to get around a system’s defenses.
ByteDance is by no means alone in having leaky models (just ask Disney about Google), but it does appear to be taking this issue seriously and is not dismissing concerns. In a statement, the company told Rendering: “ByteDance launches models with safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property, and continually works to expand and strengthen these in collaboration with rightsholders and creative communities.”
We approached U.S. studios and their trade body, the Motion Picture Association, for comment. They’ve made their position pretty clear on IP infringement through legal letters and lawsuits, but MiniMax H3 and Seedream 5.0 are a reminder that policing this stuff is like an endless game of whack-a-mole — and on a global scale.
