Seedance 2.5

Like Green Book (2018) made over US$70.7 million in China.

And one of the most popular films in 2021 was Hi, Mom (2021), made over US$785 million.

Obsession (2026) is another one that is doing amazing in China, absolutely beating high action films like Supergirl ($12 million and going vs less than $1 million)

Action sequences are forgiving. There's lots of motion and shiny vfx to fudge things over. Rapid cuts mean each shot can be short enough that the inevitable accumulation of AI hallucinations from frame to frame doesn't get distracting. Sets can be generic: if you're generating robots attacking New York, the viewer isn't going to have time to track if the bodega on the corner is in every shot, or if the Chrysler Building switches place around town. Shots can be practically from different cities and nobody will notice.

Carrying over an actor's performance is the opposite. You want long shots and impeccable scene stability. You can't just throw some additive-blended particles on the actor's face to distract from its generation deficiencies, like you can do for the Marvel scenes.

Bytedance is a corporation looking for clout, not to help filmmakers. They're releasing a model that makes them look good, and action sequences do that.

It's a counterintuitive thing to viewers who have long been told that vfx is the most expensive kind of moviemaking. With gen AI, these somewhat convincing Marvel pastiches are trivial to produce, but a sitcom episode is utterly impossible.

This is entirely because of deepfakes.

Apparently Seedance has a version without guardrails if you are a licensed production company. I suspect Google Omni would too, but I don't know anyone who uses that model.

But you're probably just blundering with value comparison since just per capita, your numbers arn't that' extreme, still the point stands.

China have 1.5 billion people vs US 350 ish

What bothers me is that every piece of content generated this way helps flood an already saturated market for content, while slowly degrading the expectations of what people see, to the point that no one will bother with shooting or animating anything anymore. Even if it's 50% worse, it's 90% cheaper, so the economics argur against producing any new physically made content. Simultaneously, it's cannibalizing all existing content. This points toward a feedback loop, like a snake eating its own tail. And even though Hollywood blockbusters have followed that pattern for a couple decades, it's demoralizing to me to see it enshrined as the future of film (or to hear from someone who makes films that it would be a preferred mode of creation).

It can be really entertaining/addicting to build with them because you're essentially pulling the slot machine and having TikTok/Marvel/YouTube come out of it. I think that was the bet with Sora but the problem is mostly that the novelty wears off quick, and most people want to just consume content without typing in what content they want to see, or sifting through mass-generated spam "content" with nothing behind it to make it worthwhile (a lot of people engage with content parasocially)

Once the tools for creators to steer and integrate models in this space get better, it will explode. We've been working on what I think will be one of the first use case for integrating these models, because I think we're approaching a middle ground where they can be integrated in experiences to provide entertainment/engagement/fun experiences without feeling like slop.

Btw, I'm impressed with some of the AI content on your site but I think you might want to pare down the non-demo pages because it has a different impression me (can I trust that this text is true? / I'm reading a lot of words but not really learning about this person) than you might have intended). I'm a bit of a hypocrite here but also speaking from experience.

I’ve built it as a side project, and the cost to produce one 20-40 minute video is in the 5$ range.

My friends/family have watched some of the better videos. All one shotted, and the storylines come out surprisingly well.

Currently working on a new engine that generates video, but it’s expensivee

Open to collabing

That is the primary issue, and secondarily it is a cookie-cutter AI slopfest that will make any technical person not submerged in Kool-Aid click away.

Please just get your AI to follow some basic UI best practices or pick up a UI library.

https://xcancel.com/CuiMao/status/2058458683781365873

I can not believe how good the AI video has gotten. In one spot the written letters were obvious AI. Other than that - I couldn't find a thing.

Obviously there are a lot of ways it shouldn't be used but I want to live in the future where it's something we use to have fun, where reasonable, rather than a dangerous/sketchy taboo

This is blessed and cursed timeline at the same time.

I’m watching H3 to see if it fixes the nonsense that LTX introduced and what happens next… WAN is due, LTX says a new model is coming, Flux3 does video.

It went from zero video models to a lot of options due this year.

OpenAI has completely shifted focus, Google still is working on various toolings/models but ultimately most people are unwilling to pay for these generations, whereby code, can easily be burned (and paid for) by businesses.

image gen isn't a proven market (at least not yet).

To give a good use case (audio generation specifically), the 2002 game Morrowind has had a resurgence lately and it's a really great game, but it lacks fully voiced lines for dialogue. A community project called Voices of Vvardenfell uses ElevenAI to generate voice lines from the voiced lines that do exist in the game. They don't take away jobs from artists because it was a monumental (unpaid) undertaking from community volunteers to do this before (there was such a big project but it was abandoned last I saw).

So as with any emerging technologies, I think it just needs to be properly regulated.

What kind of harms do you have in mind?

If in the future they can create a reward model to aid with creating super human levels of appeal tailored to me, I would considered it one of the best technologies ever made. I'm not sentimental about the source, pretty videos and pictures make me happy

I've been trying to generate concept art for a game idea. I figure, I can't draw so why not have something else bring my vision to life. After dozens of failed attempts and burned tokens I decided to just hire someone. The experience was night and day. They provided thoughtful details to help tell a story in the image. They got to tell me what they added and why, etc. This isn't even their project but their passion for it showed in the end result.

These models are impressive, but I think people watch movies because of the essence as much as the movie itself.

But yes 80s science fiction is now science fact. Talking cars like in night rider are now definitely a thing. Some can even drive themselves. The robots in Buck Rogers, Star Wars, etc. look clumsy and fake compared to the real humanoid bots we are now starting to see. More close to I Robot, which when it came out 22 years ago was pure science fiction.

If I had to guess, models have producing content that is, for most of the population, indistinguishable from reality for at least 6-12mo.

Very few people will watch a video frame by frame to pick up on or check for artifacts, especially in the places most of the population watch video (tiktok, Facebook).

I have no doubt that, just like the fast corrections to 8 fingers, the final edge cases like reflections are being ironed out in future model training.

To me, just reducing the cost alone seems secondary, far more important is putting the actual creative and marketing people directly in control of the output. Maybe the end result still gets sent to a pro studio for final production, but letting the true stakeholders directly create what they want could be a killer app. It may also be a terrible idea, like Homer Simpson's car - but that won't stop it being successful.

IIRC they give Seedance 2.5 yesterday. Byteplus API is the official way to access it as an API but I am not sure if they serve 2.5 yet.

Sorry

Also, much of the promotion of these tools come from a population of people unhappy with the current state of the real content creation industry that use real footage and real people because AI movie promoters see traditional media as mainly propaganda machines anyway, so these tools sort help level the playing field.