As AI Videos Terrify Hollywood, Is It Time To Hand IP Management To The Masses?
A viral clip featuring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting on a rooftop, created by a two-line prompt, has exposed how easily Hollywood-tier content can now be produced using artificial intelligence.
The hyperrealistic 15-second clip, created by Irish director Ruairi Robinson using a two-line prompt in Seedance 2.0, perfectly illustrated how easy it has become to produce Hollywood-tier content using artificial intelligence.
The clip, which showed Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting on a rooftop, has become the latest AI cause célèbre, sparking a debate about the future of intellectual property in the age of generative AI.
Deadpool scriptwriter Rhett Reese predicted the tool would “cost jobs all over the place,” and users were soon spinning up alternate endings for Game of Thrones and pitting Jackie Chan against Bruce Lee.
Studios Struggle To Contain The GenAI Genie
In response to the flood of AI-generated content, Disney sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter claiming the Chinese company had hijacked its iconic creations “by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters.”
ByteDance, which owns TikTok and Seedance, promised to strengthen safeguards to “prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property,” but this reassurance rings hollow.
As access to quality generative AI tools increases, a tsunami of content will be unleashed, and IPs could quickly spiral out of control.
Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.
The press release announcing the launch of Seedance vowed to let users “control their creations like a true director,” but what about other people’s creations?
A Community-Driven Solution?
Saro McKenna, the CEO of Dacoco GmbH and cofounder of Alien Worlds, argues that Hollywood’s big players were blindsided by Seedance, proving just how ill-equipped the old guard are to defend against these tools.
She suggests that the community ought to be empowered to take the IP management reins, not central actors who cannot possibly scale enforcement fast enough to manage, much less contain, the threat.
This approach is analogous to trusting the community to enforce Bitcoin’s consensus rules, where nodes (users) reject blocks that do not meet consensus rules and, in so doing, keep the network healthy.
A community-led IP management model featuring built-in arbitration and on-chain voting could enforce rules without involving a central authority.
In this model, contributors would be incentivized to vet work and decide whether it meets the canonicity threshold, with non-canon IP activity either absorbed to be exploited legally or rejected.
Beyond Canon And Commercial Exploitation
Of course, this just deals with official canon. Arguably, the ability to produce high-quality, copyright-breaking clips detracts from or cheapens an IP, even if viewers acknowledge the new works aren’t “official.”
There is also the thornier issue of outright commercial exploitation. While communities may agree on what constitutes official lore, there’s nothing stopping individuals from wielding AI to generate output featuring famous characters that they later monetize.
When high-quality AI content can be produced cheaply and at scale, the line between fan expression and outright infringement blurs.
The challenge isn’t just protecting canon; it’s preventing people from profiteering off supposedly protected IP.
If we want to maintain some semblance of control and stave off content chaos, we must look to leverage the wisdom of the crowd—humans, not AI agents—and decide our own destiny.
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