Hello again from Naarm Melbourne, and happy Lunar New Year!
This week a new cinema quality AI video model from Chinese AI company ByteDance has Hollywood up in arms. Ireland’s basic income for artists pilot has spawned into a new 3-year funding program that will support 2,000 artists. The ABC and other South Australian arts organisations will relocate to a new Arts & Media Hub in Adelaide’s CBD in 2031 and the Palestine–Israle conflict continues to be a hot button topic in the arts.
And: Australia has lost another local publisher with the closure of Echo Publishing, Alibaba, another Chinese company, has released an AI model for robots and military uses of AI continue to cause concern.
For arts and culture colleagues, don’t forget that the Creative Workplaces survey into the realities of working in the arts and creative industries in Australia closes on Monday (23 February 2026). If you haven’t completed it already I strongly urge you to.
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What’s been going on?
Here's WTF happened this week:
Cinema quality Seedance AI video is freaking Hollywood out
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 uses multimodal inputs to output consistent cinema quality video but can it survive Hollywood’s swift copyright assault?
New AI video models out of China have Hollywood up in arms. The one that is getting the most attention is Seedance 2.0, which was launched in limited beta last Thursday by ByteDance, the Chinese tech company behind TikTok. The two big steps forward is the cinematic quality of what the video creation model puts out and that it accepts multimodal inputs; users can simultaneously input up to nine images, three video clips, three audio clips and natural language prompts all of which inform the video output. Together, these user inputs can generate highly specific outputs, including by referencing input material using prompts such as @Image 1. What comes out the other end is highly consistent, high-quality, cinematic video unlike what we’ve seen from earlier AI video tools.
