ByteDance Pauses AI Video Launch Over Copyright Issues

ByteDance has reportedly postponed the launch of its new artificial intelligence video-generation model over copyright disputes.

According to several news outlets, and as first reported by The Information on Saturday (March 14), the Chinese tech giant made this decision following pushback from major Hollywood studios and streaming platforms.

PYMNTS has contacted ByteDance for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

ByteDance, which owns TikTok, had said in February it was taking measures to stop the unauthorized use of intellectual property on its Seedance 2.0  AI video generator. This came after studios such as Disney accused the company of using its characters to train the tool.

American AI firm OpenAI has faced similar intellectual property concerns over its Sora video generation tool.

Seedance’s apparent abilities came to light after videos it produced went viral in China, including one showing actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt engaged in a fight.

(It led to claims that such technology could end the filmmaking industry, though some news outlets called the clip into question, arguing it may have been created using live actors in front of a green screen.)

According to the report, ByteDance had planned to make the new video model available to customers this month but has since halted that release. The company’s legal team is trying to identify and resolve potential legal issues, while its engineers are installing safeguards to block the model from generating content that could violate intellectual property rules.

“The rise of Seedance 2.0 also ties into a larger ecosystem shift toward multimodal AI, where the ability to blend text, visual and auditory outputs seamlessly is becoming a core differentiator among leading models,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

“While text-centric systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT remain widely used, video and multimedia generation represent a rapidly growing frontier with implications for creative industries and commercial content workflows.”

OpenAI debuted its own text-to-video model, Sora, created to generate realistic video clips using written prompts. Sora showcased the ability to create minute-long, high-fidelity scenes with consistent characters and complex motion, an indication that video generation is shifting from experimental novelty to production-grade capability, PYMNTS wrote.

At the same time, as covered here, social media platforms are reworking their products in reaction to a surge in AI-generated content.

“Companies including Meta and Pinterest have begun overhauling feeds and labeling systems to more clearly distinguish between human-created and AI-generated posts, reflecting mounting pressure around transparency and trust,” that report said.

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