Keys to the Seedance phenomenon, the Chinese AI for hyperrealistic videos that challenges Hollywood

Since its launch this month, the tool has made headlines, provoked warnings from the American film industry and reflections in the audiovisual sector. These are the keys to understanding its impact:

‘Deepseek Moment’

The launch of Seedance 2.0 has been described in Chinese media as a new ‘DeepSeek moment’, in reference to the emergence, at the beginning of 2025, of the DeepSeek R1 model, which surprised American technology companies and shook the markets by evidencing the Chinese ability to compete in advanced reasoning models at a lower cost.

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The local press has summarized the sequence as “last year it was DS (DeepSeek), this year it is SD (Seedance 2.0)”, a formula that links both launches around the Lunar New Year and presents them as consecutive milestones in the development of AI.

The Bytedance seal

Seedance bears the imprint of ByteDance, the technology giant that owns TikTok and its equivalent application in China, Douyin. From the beginning, Bytedance has been able to integrate the tool into services in its ecosystem, with hundreds of millions of users in China.

Financial author Jin Duan argued in local media The Paper that the jump in the model reflects that competition in video generated by AI “has gone from algorithm to comprehensive force” and that “computing hegemony is reconfiguring the rules of the sector,” in a context in which the company has intensified its investment in computing infrastructure.

Hyperrealistic results

In the days after its launch, videos generated with Seedance 2.0 circulated on networks that showed cinematic-looking scenes, such as a fictitious fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise or action sequences with recognizable characters from major franchises, which many Internet users claimed they could not distinguish from real images.

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Short pieces with complex choreography, synchronized sound effects and fluid camera movements also went viral, from combat to simulated trailers, leading some creators to claim that the model had reached a “director” level in audiovisual production.

Impact on audiovisual creation

Chinese director Jia Zhangke, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice and the best screenplay award at Cannes, collaborated with Seedance to produce a short film in which two AI-generated versions of himself appear in dialogue and stating that “he is not worried about technology replacing cinema”, but rather “how people use technology”. He highlighted that today, “one sentence is enough to generate a video with a high level of finish.”

Along the same lines, Feng Ji, producer of the successful video game ‘Black Myth: Wukong’, stated that with tools like Seedance “the infancy of AIGC (artificial intelligence generated content) is over.”

Towards scale production

Beyond the initial virality, Chinese financial firms have pointed to a possible turning point in audiovisual production.

Huatai Securities pointed out that Seedance is moving towards “controllable creation” that could facilitate its integration into professional production processes, while BOC Securities considered that the leap in the model involves going from “generating a scene” to “completing a work”, which would allow content production to be scaled more quickly, in a standardized way and with lower structural costs.

Controversy in Hollywood

Since its launch, the tool has led to the spread on the Internet of videos with characters from franchises such as ‘Star Wars’ and Marvel, which led the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and major studios to report possible massive copyright infringements.

Disney accused ByteDance of facilitating a “pirated library” and engaging in “fraudulent appropriation” of intellectual property. ByteDance responded that it “respects intellectual property rights” and is addressing the concerns raised.