Video of the Week: Brad v Tom by Seedance 2.0

OK team - this is where things get really real.

The video above is an AI generated video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise. It's insanely good. (There are also versions of each of them fighting zombies, robots and arguing about Jeffrey Epstein, the latter of which should serve as the warning we all need as to where this is going to end up.)

It's been created by a guy called Ruairi Robinson, a filmmaker who says that he typed two sentences into the new Seedance 2.0 video generation model - from Bytedance, the Chinese makers of TikTok - and this is what came back. He is now getting death and rape threats from various faceless trolls on the wondrous cesspit that is X.com, from which I have lifted the video so that you don't have to tread there ...

Naturally, lawyers are readying their suits, actors are registering their faces as 'intellectual property' and trades unions are daubing their placards - this, as a direction of travel, is terminal for many historic ways of creating content. But, as ever - think CGI v set designers, bands v orchestras, film v stage, cameras v painters, electricity v fire, and on and on and on back to the swamps of the Palaeolithic era - it will bring with it a Cambrian explosion of new creators doing cool and exciting stuff that could never have been done before.

Will it bring with it risk, cesspits, horrible people doing disgusting things? 100% absolutely certain it will.

But is that a reason not to do it? 100% absolutely certainly not. We need to be grown up about this, use the new tools to create incredible things and deal with the nasties as we have always dealt with them. It will be bumpy, occasionally vicious, often scary but this is how humanity has always grown and will continue to do so.

Interestingly, within a couple of days Robinson himself is appealing to his followers to regain access to Seedance 2.0 as access to it has been pulled down. Have to say that I tried for an hour or so to find it this weekend and it's nowhere. Guess that Brad and Tom have found a common enemy after all and managed to defeat the might of Bytedance to get the tool nerfed. But it won't be for long - you'll be creating branded videos for your local markets using this tech before the end of the year ...