Czech ice dancers Katerina Mrazkova and Daniel Mrazek compete at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics, where their use of AI-generated music ignited a fierce debate about creativity and copyright in sport.
February 2026 will be remembered as the week AI's copyright problem stopped being theoretical and became unavoidable. In the span of just a few days, two completely different arenas, the Winter Olympics and Hollywood, got hit by the same shockwave: AI-generated content that borrows freely from copyrighted works, and a legal system that has no idea what to do about it.
On one side, ByteDance's new Seedance 2.0 video generation model flooded social media with ultra-realistic deepfakes of A-list celebrities. On the other, a pair of Czech ice dancers performed at the Milan Cortina Olympics to an AI-generated track that sounded suspiciously like a famous 1990s hit. These aren't fringe experiments anymore. This is AI slop infiltrating the biggest stages in the world, and the people responsible for protecting intellectual property are scrambling to keep up.
ByteDance Seedance 2.0 Unleashes a Deepfake Flood That Has Hollywood in Full Panic Mode
Let's start with the bigger explosion. ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, launched Seedance 2.0, its latest AI video generation model. Within hours of going live, the internet did what the internet does: it started making deepfakes of celebrities doing things they never did.
The clip that broke the internet was a hyper-realistic video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt on a rooftop. Created by Oscar-nominated Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson with, as he described it, a "two line prompt," the video hit 1.3 million views on X within 48 hours. The choreography was slick. The lighting was cinematic. The facial expressions held up even on a second watch. It looked like a scene ripped from a big-budget studio production, and it was generated by typing two sentences into a text box.
But it didn't stop there. Users quickly generated Avengers Endgame remixes, a video of Optimus Prime fighting Godzilla, and a recreation of a Friends scene with the characters played by otters. What sounds absurd on paper was, in execution, disturbingly convincing. And every single one of these videos used copyrighted characters, likenesses, and intellectual property without permission from anyone.
SAG-AFTRA, Disney, and the MPA Respond with Fury to ByteDance AI Copyright Infringement
Hollywood's response was swift and angry. SAG-AFTRA, the performers' union representing actors across the industry, issued a statement calling the Seedance videos "blatant infringement." The union specifically cited the unauthorized use of members' voices and likenesses, a particularly sore point given that AI protections for performers were a central demand during the 2023 strikes.
Disney went further. The entertainment giant sent a cease and desist letter directly to ByteDance, reportedly incensed that its intellectual property was being treated as, in the company's own phrasing, "free public domain clip art." When Disney calls your product a threat to their IP, you know you've crossed a line that corporate lawyers have been sharpening their teeth on for decades.
The Motion Picture Association's chairman, Charles Rivkin, didn't mince words either. He accused ByteDance of launching a service without "meaningful safeguards against infringement" and engaging in the unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works "on a massive scale." That's not a warning. That's the language of a lawsuit being drafted in real time.
Why Seedance 2.0 Deepfakes Are More Dangerous Than Previous AI Video Generators
Here's what makes Seedance 2.0 different from the AI video tools that came before it. Previous models could generate vaguely human-looking figures doing generic actions. Seedance 2.0 can generate recognizable faces, recognizable performances, and recognizable characters with a fidelity that crosses the line from "interesting experiment" to "legally actionable product." The Tom Cruise vs Brad Pitt video wasn't a blurry approximation. It was convincing enough that industry professionals admitted they were "shook" by what they saw.
The fact that a filmmaker of Robinson's caliber could produce something this polished with a two-line prompt tells you everything about where this technology is headed. If an Oscar-nominated director can do this with minimal effort, imagine what a content farm with a hundred workers and no ethical boundaries could churn out in a week.
The Legal Gray Zone
Current copyright law was written for a world where copying required effort. AI models can now generate derivative works of copyrighted material at industrial scale, faster than any legal system can respond. ByteDance operates primarily out of China, adding jurisdictional complexity to any enforcement action Hollywood might pursue.
Czech Ice Dancers Use AI-Generated Music at 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics and Spark a Different Kind of Copyright Fight
While Hollywood was grappling with Seedance, a quieter but equally significant AI controversy was playing out on Olympic ice. Czech ice dance siblings Katerina Mrazkova and Daniel Mrazek made their Olympic debut at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics with a routine that was half AC/DC and half AI-generated music. The International Skating Union's official listing for their rhythm dance music read: "One Two by AI (of 90s style Bon Jovi)" alongside "Thunderstruck by AC/DC."
The event required a 1990s theme, which is where things got complicated. In the run-up to the Olympics, the Czech pair caught heat because their AI-generated song contained verbatim quotes from New Radicals' 1998 hit "You Get What You Give." That's not "inspired by" territory. That's the AI model regurgitating copyrighted lyrics it was trained on, wrapped in a new arrangement, and presented as an original composition.
After the backlash, Mrazkova and Mrazek swapped in a different AI-generated track. But critics pointed out that the replacement appeared to copy Bon Jovi's "Raise Your Hands," suggesting the underlying problem wasn't the specific song choice but the AI model itself, which seemingly couldn't generate "90s-style" music without directly borrowing from actual 90s songs.
How Olympic Copyright Rules Created a Loophole That AI-Generated Music Exploits Perfectly
This is where the story gets structurally interesting. The ISU lifted its ban on lyrics in ice dance programs back in 2014, a move designed to make the sport more appealing to younger audiences. But using modern copyrighted music at the Olympics requires obtaining copyright permission from the rights holders, and that process is expensive, slow, and often unsuccessful for lesser-known skaters without major sponsorship deals.
AI-generated music sidesteps this entire problem. If the music is "original" (even if the AI was trained on copyrighted material), there's no rights holder to negotiate with. The ISU explicitly allows AI-generated music performed in the "style" of an era, which is how Mrazkova and Mrazek's routine passed the rules committee. Multiple other skaters at these Olympics were reportedly affected by music copyright issues, making the AI workaround more attractive than it might seem at first glance.
The Czech pair finished 17th in the rhythm dance qualification with a score of 72.09. They weren't medal contenders. But the precedent they set is far more consequential than their placement. If AI music is legal under ISU rules, you can bet more teams will use it at future competitions, and the line between "inspired by" and "copied from" will only get blurrier.
What ByteDance Seedance Deepfakes and Olympic AI Music Tell Us About the Collapse of Copyright Enforcement
These two stories might seem unrelated on the surface. One involves a Chinese tech giant flooding social media with celebrity deepfakes. The other involves Czech siblings skating to robot music at the Olympics. But they share the same root cause: AI models trained on copyrighted material that can generate derivative works faster than any legal framework can process.
In Hollywood, the response has been aggressive. Cease and desist letters, union statements, MPA condemnations. But ByteDance operates out of China, where U.S. copyright law has limited reach. Even if Disney successfully pressures ByteDance to add safeguards, the model is already out there. Other companies in other jurisdictions will build similar tools. The cat isn't just out of the bag, it's generated an AI version of itself that's indistinguishable from the original.
In figure skating, the response has been a shrug. The ISU says it's allowed. The AI music technically doesn't violate the rules as written. But "technically legal" and "ethically sound" are very different standards, and as AI music generators improve, the number of Olympic routines performed to algorithmic compositions will only increase.
The Bigger Picture for AI Copyright Law and Why 2026 Could Be the Breaking Point
What February 2026 has shown us is that AI's collision with copyright isn't a future problem. It's a present crisis unfolding across every industry simultaneously. The entertainment industry, the music industry, the sports world, they're all dealing with the same fundamental question: when an AI model is trained on copyrighted works and then generates something "new" that bears obvious resemblance to those works, who owns what?
Nobody has a good answer yet. The courts haven't ruled decisively. The legislation hasn't caught up. And the technology is advancing faster than either institution can move. Every week brings a new example of AI-generated content that would have been science fiction five years ago and is now available to anyone with an internet connection and a text prompt.
Disney can send all the cease and desist letters it wants. SAG-AFTRA can condemn ByteDance in the strongest possible terms. The ISU can allow AI music while critics complain. None of it changes the underlying reality: the tools exist, they're getting better, and the legal guardrails haven't been built yet.
We're watching copyright law break in real time. February 2026 just gave us two front-row seats to the collapse.