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The Medium identifies essential signals on how technology is shaping creativity, and how creatives are evolving in response.
Seedance Proves Generative AI Must Become Gaming
Hollywood is fighting with cease-and-desist letters. The real fight is over who builds the walls first.
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[Author’s Note: This essay is free for all subscribers]
A few years ago, a gaming executive explained to me that while the writer’s rooms in Hollywood and gaming look similar during ideation, they diverge sharply during production. A TV script is a closed loop—a linear journey from point A to point B—whereas a game script is a living map of “if/then” logic. Every possible choice by a player creates a ripple effect across the contained universe. Writers must build a narrative architecture that survives thousands of different permutations.
“Modding” in gaming is a user embracing those contained universes and adjusting code to create a highly personalized version of that universe. I wrote on Monday that platforms like Seedance 2.0 and Veo 3.1 are enabling a mix of modding and “fan fiction”. Fans can prompt their own video “scripts” and generative AI platforms produce the mods for them. Modding is no longer limited to game scripts and code. TV shows and movies are now vulnerable because of generative AI.
One X post I read from an AI consultant and film director predicted last week that, except for screenwriters, “literally every job in film industry is gone, you upload a script, it generates scenes (not just clips) with vfx, voice, sfx, music all nicely edited, we may not even need editors anymore”. “Maybe” screenwriters are still needed “because the stories AI write are still cliché but.. the machine is learning faster and faster”.
What he misses is that whether the machine is spitting out modded video game highlights or modded viral social media videos, it is all modding and not storytelling.
In gaming, the contained universe enables the business model for modding. The computer code that constrains what users can and cannot mod also monetizes it.
Generative AI platforms have no walls. The only limit is what is in the database—and the database is the entire internet.
The results look similar in our digital media feeds. A clip of a video game mod plays almost identically to a clip from Seedance. But one has a business model whereas the other does not.
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Without constraints, there is no monetization. Without monetization, there is no business model. Without a business model, there is only piracy.
Hollywood is not fighting Seedance. It is fighting the absence of walls. Walls are the business model. Gaming understands this—this is one reason why “Games are the future”.
Generative AI cannot be its own medium. It must evolve towards gaming. Whoever builds the contained universe first captures the value.
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