Keys to the Seedance phenomenon, the Chinese AI for hyperrealistic videos that challenges Hollywood

Beijing.- A year after DeepSeek shook the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry with its 'chatbot', China returns to the center of the technological debate with the hyperrealistic videos of Seedance 2.0, ByteDance's video tool that opens a new battle in the sector and rekindles the controversy over copyright in Hollywood. Since its launch this month, the tool has grabbed headlines, prompted warnings from the American film industry, and sparked reflections in the audiovisual sector. These are the keys to understanding its impact:

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'Deepseek Moment'

The launch of Seedance 2.0 has been described in Chinese media as a new 'DeepSeek moment', referring to the emergence, at the beginning of 2025, of the DeepSeek R1 model, which surprised US technology companies and shook the markets by demonstrating China's ability to compete in advanced reasoning models at a lower cost. The local press has summarized the sequence as "last year was DS (DeepSeek), this year is SD (Seedance 2.0)", a formula that links both releases around the Lunar New Year and presents them as consecutive milestones in AI development.

The Bytedance Seal

Seedance bears the imprint of ByteDance, the technological giant that owns TikTok and its equivalent application in China, Douyin. From the outset, Bytedance has been able to integrate the tool into services within its ecosystem, with hundreds of millions of users in China. Financial author Jin Duan argued in the local media The Paper that the model's leap reflects that the competition in AI-generated video "has shifted from the algorithm to comprehensive strength" and that "the hegemony of computing is reconfiguring the rules of the sector," in a context where the company has intensified its investment in computing infrastructure.

Hyperrealistic Results

In the days following its release, videos generated with Seedance 2.0 circulated on social media, showcasing cinematic-looking scenes, such as a fictional fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise or action sequences with recognizable characters from major franchises, which many internet users claimed they couldn't distinguish from real images. Short pieces with complex choreographies, synchronized sound effects, and fluid camera movements, from fights to simulated trailers, also went viral, leading some creators to claim that the model had reached a "director" level in audiovisual production.

Impact on Audiovisual Creation

Chinese director Jia Zhangke, winner of the Golden Lion in Venice and the award for best screenplay in Cannes, collaborated with Seedance to produce a short film in which two AI-generated versions of himself appear, dialoguing and stating that "he is not worried that technology will replace cinema", but rather "how people use technology". Furthermore, he emphasized that today "a single sentence is enough to generate a video with a fairly high level of finish." In the same vein, Feng Ji, producer of the successful video game 'Black Myth: Wukong', warned that with tools like Seedance "the infancy of AIGC (artificial intelligence generated content) has ended".

Towards large-scale production

Beyond the initial virality, Chinese financial firms have pointed to a possible turning point in audiovisual production. For Huatai Securities, Seedance is moving towards a "controllable creation" that could facilitate its integration into professional production processes. Meanwhile, BOC Securities considered that the model's leap means going from "generating a scene" to "completing a work", which would allow scaling content production more quickly, in a standardized way, and with lower structural costs.

Hollywood Controversy

Since its launch, the tool has led to the spread on the internet of videos featuring characters from franchises such as 'Star Wars' and Marvel, which led the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and major studios to denounce possible massive copyright infringements. Disney accused ByteDance of facilitating a "pirated library" and of engaging in "fraudulent appropriation" of intellectual property. ByteDance responded that it "respects intellectual property rights" and is addressing the concerns raised.