ByteDance's release of Seadance 2.0 this week added another capable AI video generation tool to a category that is growing faster than anyone's ability to predict its consequences for content creators.
The optimistic reading is democratisation. Small businesses and individuals who could not previously afford video production can now create ads and content without significant budgets. That is a real change with real beneficiaries.
The more complicated reading is what happens to the economics of attention when the cost of producing content approaches zero.
The number of videos competing for the same eyeballs increases. The ability of any individual creator to break through on the strength of production quality diminishes.
What becomes scarce, and therefore valuable, is authenticity: evidence that a real person with real experiences is behind the content rather than a model trained to approximate one.
That shift may ultimately benefit established creators more than emerging ones.
A new creator trying to build a following in an environment saturated with AI-generated content faces a harder problem than one that existed two years ago.