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What is the controversy surrounding C-Dance 2.0 and Hollywood?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper.
A brand new video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise isn't real, but it circulated around the internet and it caused quite a stir in Hollywood. I am joined by Carmi Levy. It is time for technology time. This video was, of course, AI. Carmi, welcome to the show. Good to be with you, David. Thanks for having me. Did you watch this video of, what was it, Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt? Yeah, sort of like post-apocalyptic landscape. I mean, it would make for an amazing movie trailer. It looked and felt that good. Like the level of cinematic goodness was off the charts. Cinematic goodness. That's a brand new phrase. I like it. It's yours. But it was really cool. And like, it sort of caught you off guard. I can see why it went viral because the quality was there.
It involved obviously two actors who, you know, are incredibly famous. And so like all the ingredients of virality were there. And then as it turns out, it wasn't real at all. It was AI generated by this new tool called C-Dance 2.0, which, you know, has brought to us by the good folks at ByteDance, who also, not coincidentally, brought us TikTok. So, you know, yet again, we're having this conversation. Remember when OpenAI released Sora and then Google released Veo, now they're at Sora 2 and Veo 3. We had sort of similar freakouts, right? Like now the studios have issued cease and desist letters to ByteDance basically saying like, you either protect our copyright or we'll see you in court. Every single time a new video generator app is released that kind of raises the bar in terms of fidelity and capability, this happens.
Content goes viral. Everybody freaks out that it's the end of days, that AI is taking over, that the established world order of how movies get made is under threat. And now, because C-Dance is so much better than all that have come before it, apparently, and it doesn't have those protections built in, and it has that cinematic quality to it that the other video generators don't have, it is really causing a lot of people to go, hmm, have we perched another or have we reached another AI inflection point? It's a reasonable question to ask. Two ways I want to take this conversation. One, I saw the initial thread on Twitter X, whatever you want to call it. And yes, I was surprised by how real it looked.
But then just underneath it, there was just regular average everyday Twitter users with like, you know, normal numbers of followers who then posted their videos of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt doing things in cinematic environments using seed dance. Seed dance? Seed dance. Seed ants. Seed ants. Seed ants. Okay. Okay. I'll learn how to say this one. I guess they're playing on ByteDance, but I don't see it, but whatever. Okay. Good try, ByteDance. That's right. ByteDance. Byte me, ByteDance. Yes.
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Now, okay. And it was regular everyday users and they were generating videos that this, you know, Hollywood person or person that got all this attention was generating. And they were just as good. These tools are in the regular user's hands right now. Which is so wild to me. This isn't like some person who had access to some crazy preview technology making a point and no one could access that tech. Anyone can do this right now. Okay, that's one thing I want to say. And I think that's what's scaring the studios is that someone with no training, no film skills whatsoever can... can't hold a camera, can't edit to save their life, can't block out a scene, but can take something that's already out there.
So, you know, the original trailer that someone also created using just a couple of lines of a prompt and then build on that and continue to, you know, raise the quality bar without any knowledge is astounding. It threatens the world order that the entire entertainment industry has followed for the better part of the last century. And it's got a lot of people scared for good reason. Okay, the other thing is, if the Screen Actors Guild gets their act together to kind of prevent this stuff, or even if regulators and politicians pass laws to prevent deepfakes of actors so that Hollywood somehow gets preserved and saved, you know, people can't make AI movies, whatever, with actors' likenesses.
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4 chaptersSpeakers
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