Seedance 2.5

It's not about cultural difference but simply what's easier.

Action sequences are forgiving. There's lots of motion and shiny vfx to fudge things over. Rapid cuts mean each shot can be short enough that the inevitable accumulation of AI hallucinations from frame to frame doesn't get distracting. Sets can be generic: if you're generating robots attacking New York, the viewer isn't going to have time to track if the bodega on the corner is in every shot, or if the Chrysler Building switches place around town. Shots can be practically from different cities and nobody will notice.

Carrying over an actor's performance is the opposite. You want long shots and impeccable scene stability. You can't just throw some additive-blended particles on the actor's face to distract from its generation deficiencies, like you can do for the Marvel scenes.

Bytedance is a corporation looking for clout, not to help filmmakers. They're releasing a model that makes them look good, and action sequences do that.

It's a counterintuitive thing to viewers who have long been told that vfx is the most expensive kind of moviemaking. With gen AI, these somewhat convincing Marvel pastiches are trivial to produce, but a sitcom episode is utterly impossible.

Don't they just have 3x as many video game nerds? Those numbers sound pretty similar per capita.

Google and xAI only allow 720p when you start adding references, and neither allow you to sync to audio.

This is entirely because of deepfakes.

Apparently Seedance has a version without guardrails if you are a licensed production company. I suspect Google Omni would too, but I don't know anyone who uses that model.

China has a population 4 times bigger than the US, and the films you cite did roughly 4 times better in each example.

I hear this a lot, but I observed this is no longer that simple.

Like Green Book (2018) made over US$70.7 million in China.

And one of the most popular films in 2021 was Hi, Mom (2021), made over US$785 million.

Obsession (2026) is another one that is doing amazing in China, absolutely beating high action films like Supergirl ($12 million and going vs less than $1 million)

Or western movies don’t have stories Chinese audience would relate to, but for dumb visual effect fests, there is no story so it works everywhere.

The faces look amazing. They can post train for identity preservation easy, that is just an adapter

I2p makes more sense and easier to do. But t2v is indeed of no use in any serious production, you must have the actor, product or setting communicated to the model visually

hong kong films is the mirror image of hollywood and fantasy/action are a lot more popular than american.

But you're probably just blundering with value comparison since just per capita, your numbers arn't that' extreme, still the point stands.

Are they targeting movies or ads?

why you also didn't consider population size different ???

China have 1.5 billion people vs US 350 ish

Surprising. I thought Vin Diesel was a twat in any language.

I went to Art Center for film. Loved it. But ended up writing software instead of shooting movies (while still also handling a lot of visual art direction, graphics work, UI, 3D animation, etc). Now I feel like we're starting to be roughly in the same boat as far as using prompts.

What bothers me is that every piece of content generated this way helps flood an already saturated market for content, while slowly degrading the expectations of what people see, to the point that no one will bother with shooting or animating anything anymore. Even if it's 50% worse, it's 90% cheaper, so the economics argur against producing any new physically made content. Simultaneously, it's cannibalizing all existing content. This points toward a feedback loop, like a snake eating its own tail. And even though Hollywood blockbusters have followed that pattern for a couple decades, it's demoralizing to me to see it enshrined as the future of film (or to hear from someone who makes films that it would be a preferred mode of creation).

MiniMax H3 is going to release weights. You can locally run it with definitely less than $10k (and possibly faster than Seedance's queue), and it's fun to train it for whatever you need.

Curious what you think of sentienttube.com

I’ve built it as a side project, and the cost to produce one 20-40 minute video is in the 5$ range.

My friends/family have watched some of the better videos. All one shotted, and the storylines come out surprisingly well.

Currently working on a new engine that generates video, but it’s expensivee

Open to collabing

IS that a real person's website? It looks entirely AI generated, even the copy and sample projects.

I've been dabbling in this space on the application layer and have spent a few hundred myself experimenting with video models.

It can be really entertaining/addicting to build with them because you're essentially pulling the slot machine and having TikTok/Marvel/YouTube come out of it. I think that was the bet with Sora but the problem is mostly that the novelty wears off quick, and most people want to just consume content without typing in what content they want to see, or sifting through mass-generated spam "content" with nothing behind it to make it worthwhile (a lot of people engage with content parasocially)

Once the tools for creators to steer and integrate models in this space get better, it will explode. We've been working on what I think will be one of the first use case for integrating these models, because I think we're approaching a middle ground where they can be integrated in experiences to provide entertainment/engagement/fun experiences without feeling like slop.

Btw, I'm impressed with some of the AI content on your site but I think you might want to pare down the non-demo pages because it has a different impression me (can I trust that this text is true? / I'm reading a lot of words but not really learning about this person) than you might have intended). I'm a bit of a hypocrite here but also speaking from experience.

For first of us without twitter:

https://xcancel.com/CuiMao/status/2058458683781365873

I can not believe how good the AI video has gotten. In one spot the written letters were obvious AI. Other than that - I couldn't find a thing.

This is deeply disturbing…for so…so so many reasons.

I dont normally like AI videos but this was just amazing, by next year the tech will be perfect, cheaper, we are going to AI videos everywhere whether anyone likes it or not.

People are still figuring out the social norms surrounding "deepfakes" and I'm convinced there are some versions of the future where it becomes normalized for content under essentially fair use/free speech doctrine, and many where it's used to restrict free speech in the small number of jurisdictions where public figures would currently be allowed to be featured in this content.

Obviously there are a lot of ways it shouldn't be used but I want to live in the future where it's something we use to have fun, where reasonable, rather than a dangerous/sketchy taboo

That is absolutely hilarious. Dario Amodei, a romcom lead.

I can't make up my mind if the simplistic narrative typical of Chinese romcom shorts is more funny or more weird.

I wonder if it'd handle chopsticks better: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/p0yrn0x4q5pdz1ibl0gfa/Screens... (from your first link)

The scene that says “Stanford University” looks a lot like UCLA.

There is a ton of vertical dramas now (Duanju) made purely of AI. Even on chinese streaming services you find it.

The whole damm Makoto Shinkai based dorama style too!

This is blessed and cursed timeline at the same time.

I guess the orange sphincter is really a flower…

what a time to be alive

"Intriguing... but highly disturbing"

Not a fan of this AI slop. We should boycott it

This. I'm very much happy to see minimax-h3 be released. I have so many projects that I have on the back burner that I could complete within minutes instead of hours and hours. "Typography, UI, and Graphics".

New model day, here we go again! It’s a week of madness and all the wrong advice… and at the end of the week, the model is either dead or a massive hit. There is little middle ground.

I’m watching H3 to see if it fixes the nonsense that LTX introduced and what happens next… WAN is due, LTX says a new model is coming, Flux3 does video.

It went from zero video models to a lot of options due this year.

What "harm"?

The only "harm" is from the authoritarians wanting to ensure only they have the means to produce propaganda for the masses.

Now the masses can amplify their own voices instead.

What are the positive applications? This all seems to be generating fake images/videos just because we can, not because it solves any real problems. It makes me wonder where the money is coming from to fund this stuff. Why would a regular person want to generate fake videos except for purposes of deception or debauchery?

While I generally think it's balanced against a lot of negative applications (misinformation, deepfakes, etc.), there are some good applications. I think regulation just hasn't sufficiently caught up with the harm they can cause.

To give a good use case (audio generation specifically), the 2002 game Morrowind has had a resurgence lately and it's a really great game, but it lacks fully voiced lines for dialogue. A community project called Voices of Vvardenfell uses ElevenAI to generate voice lines from the voiced lines that do exist in the game. They don't take away jobs from artists because it was a monumental (unpaid) undertaking from community volunteers to do this before (there was such a big project but it was abandoned last I saw).

So as with any emerging technologies, I think it just needs to be properly regulated.

You comment is completely unethical it's funny you think you are saying something good

Now they cause harm because there's people that may believe a fake video is real. But people is developing skepticism about what they see in videos and learning to think that they may be generated, before taking them as true.

What kind of harms do you have in mind?

> I haven't seen enough positive applications

If in the future they can create a reward model to aid with creating super human levels of appeal tailored to me, I would considered it one of the best technologies ever made. I'm not sentimental about the source, pretty videos and pictures make me happy

Which might mean a lot for individual but is peanuts for a business

Which is next to nothing compared to the cost of a movie, animated TV show, or quality YouTube video.

I think we as humans are just really good at being able to tell. CGI has been around for decades and yet we can still look at it and say "yeah that was CGI". Uncanny valley I guess?

No need to fret, this is the worst it's going to be. Remember, Will Smith + Spaghetti videos?

I would say we are pretty much there.

I think for me it's just missing the "essence". Making a film is hard, but that labor with multiple people who are passionate about the project is just as important as the end result.

I've been trying to generate concept art for a game idea. I figure, I can't draw so why not have something else bring my vision to life. After dozens of failed attempts and burned tokens I decided to just hire someone. The experience was night and day. They provided thoughtful details to help tell a story in the image. They got to tell me what they added and why, etc. This isn't even their project but their passion for it showed in the end result.

These models are impressive, but I think people watch movies because of the essence as much as the movie itself.

The thing is, it has the same essential property that you don't control it any more. The problem with these tools is the lack of fine grained control means there is no room for you to express your individual creative input. Your total input is a few sentences of a prompt, then the AI did all the creative part. If the creative input is what you enjoyed, it is actually not that much more (or even less) here than it was with traditional film.

Was just going to say... Even if all AI gives me is the opportunity to bring my visions to life even somewhat terribly... That's a lot better than I'd be able to do without it. Which is for them to go nowhere. I'll take it.

I am not a film maker but I had some sketches on my head that I always wanted to try to make. Even Gemini scratched the itch for me, and my folder “projects” is growing with other ideas that I’d like to sketch

I am going through the same struggle but with software development.

Speaking of the eighties, special effects were still done without CGI and typically on the cheap. That didn't make the movies and television series any less fun to watch. In the end it's about what people do with the tools, not the quality of the tools. People commenting on how these generated videos are not perfect or are getting some details wrong, look at some blockbuster movies from last century. It's very easy to spot the special effects. And it did not matter.

But yes 80s science fiction is now science fact. Talking cars like in night rider are now definitely a thing. Some can even drive themselves. The robots in Buck Rogers, Star Wars, etc. look clumsy and fake compared to the real humanoid bots we are now starting to see. More close to I Robot, which when it came out 22 years ago was pure science fiction.

Video generation models generate videos of a predetermined duration, so if a character finishes a line but there's still seconds remaining, then the model still has to fill it in

Good spot, but the AI tells are getting so so much harder to spot.

If I had to guess, models have producing content that is, for most of the population, indistinguishable from reality for at least 6-12mo.

Very few people will watch a video frame by frame to pick up on or check for artifacts, especially in the places most of the population watch video (tiktok, Facebook).

I have no doubt that, just like the fast corrections to 8 fingers, the final edge cases like reflections are being ironed out in future model training.

AFAIK there are providers that give you API access to Seedance, like OpenRouter etc.

it seems perfect for that - maintaining coherence over 30s-1min type window is achievable and so many ads are built on unrealistic premise to begin with.

To me, just reducing the cost alone seems secondary, far more important is putting the actual creative and marketing people directly in control of the output. Maybe the end result still gets sent to a pro studio for final production, but letting the true stakeholders directly create what they want could be a killer app. It may also be a terrible idea, like Homer Simpson's car - but that won't stop it being successful.

Same pass.

People said this kind of thing about MiniDV cameras, and then iPhones. The reality is that technology hasn't been a barrier for filmmakers for a very long time. Writing is still the hard part.

Why do people keep making these models? Don't they care about the effects this has? It's either that, or they do it on purpose. Just let people push clips about foreigners eating dogs, Jews dry-bleeding babies or the police choking another black man on TikTok, and sit back. "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."

Its not released in the US yet

Dreamina (https://dreamina.capcut.com/) is the “official” access for this.

IIRC they give Seedance 2.5 yesterday. Byteplus API is the official way to access it as an API but I am not sure if they serve 2.5 yet.

Openrouter has video generation also. They do have Seedance which afaik routes via something called ‚atlas cloud’, but it did work.

Yeah wondering that. I ended up almost paying for one when 2.0 came out. Still not sure I've found something official.

Why amplify the copycat spam domains?

They’re*

Sorry

I think that will remain the use case of these tools as long as it is still so easy to tell they don't represent reality very well. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe we're not ready for a world where any video longer than a brief clip is indistinguishable from reality.

Also, much of the promotion of these tools come from a population of people unhappy with the current state of the real content creation industry that use real footage and real people because AI movie promoters see traditional media as mainly propaganda machines anyway, so these tools sort help level the playing field.

There are thriving Ai video communities who are trying to replicate big budget productions with indie resources. Look up Gossip Goblin. There's a parallel explosion of memes at the same time, like Balenciaga Harry Potter

Marketers are creating legit ads with these.

Of course not. You can use them to make objectively silly fetish fodder, too.

P*rn!

I belive thats what it WILL be, its heavily used in scammy and poltiical bullshit currently, but its only a matter of time until the cost vs benefit makes sense for hollywood and companies to start using it for actual commercials and tv shows and special effects etc for major videos.

Misinformation, phishing campaigns, brainrot...

I get entertainment value out of watching the videos other haves created. I hear of educators creating educational value from the videos they make as it allows them to make higher quality explanations.

Unlike the coding models it seems like the generative art models do a lot more harm than good.

It's just you. Any director, storyteller, or filmmaker can see the potential here to realize scenes that simply wouldn't be possible otherwise. But indeed there's plenty of slop coming out too.