Hollywood strikes first AI copyright truce with ByteDance

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred The Motion Picture Assn.has struck its first agreement with an artificial intelligence company, saying Monday that ByteDance has strengthened copyright guardrails into its AI video and image tools that drew legal threats from every major Hollywood studio in February.ByteDance, a Chinese company, is the former majority owner of TikTok’s U.S.

operations.The MPA, the trade association that lobbies for major studios such as Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment, said it has had constructive engagement with ByteDance over the last several months to rein in Seedance, a text-to-video generation tool, and Seedream, which produces images using text commands.“Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry – and reinforces our commitment to protect creative content,” said MPA Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Rivkin.MPA declined to share the specific guardrails in the agreement.

Business The former majority owner of TikTok has quietly continued to court filmmakers, independent artists and executives who are eager to learn more about the AI video generation model called Seedance.The agreement comes as some studios have expressed concerns about AI models training on their copyrighted material without permission or compensation.In February, MPA issued a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging Seedance 2.0 was trained on copyrighted material and generating unauthorized videos featuring characters such as “SpongeBob SquarePants” and visuals replicating a scene from sci-fi series “Stranger Things” without studios’ permission.

It was the first time the MPA had filed a cease-and-desist letter to a major AI firm.“ByteDance is engaged in pervasive and widespread infringement of our members’ valuable intellectual prop...