AI incident ·
Seedance 2.0 Reportedly Generated Viral Tom Cruise–Brad Pitt Fight Video, Prompting Hollywood IP and Likeness Complaints
In brief
An AI system built by Bytedance and deployed by Bytedance and Ruairi Robinson allegedly harmed Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and 3 others.
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 3 reports
What happened
A filmmaker reportedly used ByteDance's AI video tool Seedance 2.0 to create and post a purportedly realistic clip depicting Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, which then circulated widely online. Industry groups and studios publicly alleged the tool enables unauthorized use of copyrighted material and performers' likeness, and at least one studio reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter. ByteDance said it respects IP and would strengthen safeguards.
Laws that address this harm
Policy angle: Classified under Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms (Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.
- Colorado AI Act
- Framework Convention on AI (CETS 225)
- India DPDP Act
- Law on Artificial Intelligence (2025)
- Law No. 132/2025 on artificial intelligence
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (3)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Bytedance, Ruairi Robinson
- Alleged developer
- Bytedance
- Alleged harmed party
- Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Actors, Film Industry, Epistemic Integrity
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms
- Risk subdomain
- 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —
Risk entries describing this failure mode
Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 6.3.
- Cultural dispossession
"Cultural dispossession - Intentional and/or unintentional erasure of cultural goods and values, such as ways of speaking, expressing humour, or sounds and voices that contribute to a cultural identity, or their inapprop...
- Loss of creativity/critical thinking
"Loss of creativity/critical thinking - Devaluation and/or deterioration of human creativity, artistic ex- pression, imagination, critical thinking or problem-solving skills."
- Copyright infringement
"The use of large amounts of copyrighted data for training general- purpose AI models poses a challenge to traditional intellectual property laws, and to systems of consent, compensation, and control over data. The use o...
- Risks of copyright infringement
"The use of vast amounts of data for training general- purpose AI models has caused concerns related to data rights and intellectual property. Data collection and content generation can implicate a variety of data rights...
- Copyright Violation
"LLM systems may output content similar to existing works, infringing on copyright owners."
- Intellectual property rights violations
"This is an emerging category, with more cases prone to appear as the use of generative AI tools–such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or ChatGPT–becomes more widespread. Some content creators are already suing for the a...
- Impact on Intellectual Property Rights
"The extent and effectiveness of legal protections for intellectual property have been thrown into question with the rise of generative AI. Generative AI trains itself on vast pools of data that often include IP-protecte...
- Copyright challenges (copyright-infringing output)
"Even though models generally create new outputs, it is possible that the content produced by a generative AI tool—such as an image, or even computer code— could turn out to be almost identical to that used in the traini...
Incidents in the same risk subdomain
- The New York Times Sued Perplexity for Allegedly Using Copyrighted Content and Generating False Attributions
- Reported Disqualification of Two Books from the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Due to Alleged AI-Generated Cover Art
- Unauthorized AI Impersonation of George Carlin Used in Comedy Special
- GAN Artwork Won First Place at State Fair Competition
Source record: incident #1377 on the AI Incident Database · all 3 reports