Seedance, Kling and the Chinese AI Video Ecosystem

A Regulatory Puzzle

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“China’s AI video ecosystem is moving at hyper-speed, while the CCP… is scrambling to tighten control in real time.”

It’s been a big week for Chinese AI video.

ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Kuaishou’s Kling 3.0 are going viral. Seedance probably takes the cake, being promoted for smoother motion, stronger scene coherence, and watermark-free downloads.

My favorite trend so far: people making videos of themselves cooking Lebron James.

On the other hand, the Cyberspace Administration (CAC) just announced it’s pre-Lunar New Year crackdown by removing more than 540k pieces of illicit AI content on Douyin, Wechat, and Weibo and taken action against over 13k accounts, making a statement that it’s stepping up enforcement of unlabeled or “garbage” AI-generated content.

China’s AI video ecosystem is moving at hyper-speed, while the CCP, typically the world’s most adept and overbearing content regulator, is scrambling to tighten control in real time. This is a bit puzzling, since China already has one of the most ambitious frameworks in the world for labeling and managing AI-generated content. If the rules were put in place for a moment like this, why does it feel like they’re not working?