Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch are calling for a halt to the new version of ByteDance’s artificial intelligence app, Seedance, which generates videos of real people and licensed characters, raising copyright and intellectual property concerns.
Seedance 2.0 “is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs,” Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Welch, D-Vt., wrote in a letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo that was first obtained by CNBC.
Their letter is a sign of growing concerns on Capitol Hill about how AI companies are developing and using their models and whether proper protections are in place for those who generate the materials the models train from.
“Responsible global companies follow the law and respect core economic rights, including intellectual property and personal likeness protections,” Blackburn and Welch wrote. They cited examples of Seedance 2.0 creations, made after the platform went live Feb. 12, that included actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and the Netflix
show “Stranger Things.”
