Google's New AI Video Tool Floods Internet With Real-Looking Clips (axios.com) 65
Google's new AI video tool, Veo 3, is being used to create hyperrealistic videos that are now flooding the internet, terrifying viewers "with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred," reports Axios. From the report: Unlike OpenAI's video generator Sora, released more widely last December, Google DeepMind's Veo 3 can include dialogue, soundtracks and sound effects. The model excels at following complex prompts and translating detailed descriptions into realistic videos. The AI engine abides by real-world physics, offers accurate lip-syncing, rarely breaks continuity and generates people with lifelike human features, including five fingers per hand.
According to examples shared by Google and from users online, the telltale signs of synthetic content are mostly absent.
In one viral example posted on X, filmmaker and molecular biologist Hashem Al-Ghaili shows a series of short films of AI-generated actors railing against their AI creators and prompts. Special effects technology, video-editing apps and camera tech advances have been changing Hollywood for many decades, but artificially generated films pose a novel challenge to human creators. In a promo video for Flow, Google's new video tool that includes Veo 3, filmmakers say the AI engine gives them a new sense of freedom with a hint of eerie autonomy. "It feels like it's almost building upon itself," filmmaker Dave Clark says.
In one viral example posted on X, filmmaker and molecular biologist Hashem Al-Ghaili shows a series of short films of AI-generated actors railing against their AI creators and prompts. Special effects technology, video-editing apps and camera tech advances have been changing Hollywood for many decades, but artificially generated films pose a novel challenge to human creators. In a promo video for Flow, Google's new video tool that includes Veo 3, filmmakers say the AI engine gives them a new sense of freedom with a hint of eerie autonomy. "It feels like it's almost building upon itself," filmmaker Dave Clark says.
Terrified or just lazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
terrifying viewers "with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred,"
Thus far this is true only if you limit your sources of "information" and "knowledge" to youtube, tiktok and your favorite billionaire-owned infotainment channel; and your manner of receiving news to "consuming", that is swallowing it instead of using your head to put two and two together. You survived email phishing, you ought to survive the fake videos as well. Of course, it will be easier if you also vote out the billionaire influence so that they cannot weasel out of selling you lies, but that's entirely up to you, and it is a difficult job.
Now, once that neuralink chip is fitted to you, all bets are off, but until then you still have a chance.
If you choose to accept it :)
Re:Terrified or just lazy? (Score:5, Funny)
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In fairness, gerbils are some of the most difficult critters to render faithfully!
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What was the uncensored version?
"a video of Daenerys Targaryen fed up with a report the size of "The Histories of Westeros" while looking with a pair of old binoculars all over her garden trying to locate a mouse and a gerbil"?
Re:Terrified or just lazy? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the plus side, maybe we can ask an LLM to write better versions of the last seasons of Game of Thrones and get Veo3 to render it.
Re:Terrified or just lazy? (Score:4, Insightful)
this is true only if you limit your sources of "information" and "knowledge" to youtube
I don't but tens of millions do! The terrifying part is not about you and me, it's what happens when bad actors use this tool to dupe individuals, or the the masses.
Re: Terrified or just lazy? (Score:1)
Are you just being lazy, since you have the same tool available to educate the ignorant masses?
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"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
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terrifying viewers "with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred,"
Thus far this is true only if you limit your sources of "information" and "knowledge" to youtube, tiktok and your favorite billionaire-owned infotainment channel; and your manner of receiving news to "consuming", that is swallowing it instead of using your head to put two and two together. You survived email phishing..
If email phishing is still a thing, then it's not extinct. There are still plenty of victims today. Just as there will be victims of increasingly realistic AI content tomorrow. Using your head to put "two and two together" isn't going to be valid advice when it's every channel abusing AI to create content as cheaply as possible.
We think phishing was bad? When AI starts creating content on behalf of AI, it will be like someone shut off all the email spam filters. We humans will be overwhelmed with conte
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Your overuse of italics is almost profoundly annoying.
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Your overuse of italics is almost profoundly annoying.
I guess it's a good thing it's almost annoying.
Otherwise, I might give a shit.
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I guess it's a good thing it's almost annoying.
Otherwise, I might give a shit.
You misread -- I said it's almost profoundly annoying. It's definitely annoying.
Perhaps you were confused by my imitative overuse of italics.
Absolutely Terrifying. (Score:4)
It doesn't matter that you or I can, with effort, discern fact from fiction. It doesn't even matter that we will spend an inordinate amount of time filtering everything in our lives through fact checking.
What matters, and it very much matters to us, is that we will be completely outnumbered by people who cannot discern the difference. People who do not fact check. People who believe their eyes and ears over anything else, even logic. People you believe in superstition.
What happens to us few, that are vastly outnumbered, when the believers turn on us? What will you do when the crowd wants to stamp out immigrants/Jews/"heretics"/billionaires/climate deniers/round Earthers/blacks/fags..? How will we physical defend ourselves when the crowd, thoroughly convinced by AI deepfakes, screams 'Burn the witch!'?
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Even real news is fake. Look no further than the media's coverage of President Trump's meeting with the South African president and their coverage, misdirection, and cover up. But don't take my word for it. These videos aren't AI, I've seen them YEARS ago. People in SA need to have electric fences around their homes to keep safe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But nothing to see here! Nope.
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Thus far this is true only if you limit your sources of "information" and "knowledge" to youtube, tiktok and your favorite billionaire-owned infotainment channel;
Nope. At least one state - Oklahoma - is mandating their schools teach Trump's 2020 election conspiracy lies to their schoolchildren [usatoday.com].
Colour me impressed. Movie studios dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Uau, That's a long trip from Final Fantasy! I suppose it's a matter of time till all movie studios are dead, or at least so changed as the newspapers with the advent of the Internet. It's the same situation, democratization of publishing, If everybody can make a film by writing a prompt, then all you need is the script writer, really. Well, and a film editor, probably.
On the plus side, perhaps we'll see some original content now. On the minus side, I guess the 2030's Oscars ceremony will sport no glamour actresses on the red carpet, but geeks holding laptops. Instead of "who's you dress from?" (Valentino) you'll have "who's your bot from?" (OpenAI's "Filminator" with some continuity tweaks from a recent startup, you wouldn't know it)
I wonder if you could prompt it just "Take 'A Tale of Two Cities' and make a film from it"., and what would happen.
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Remember the blink tag and Comic Sans? That's what you get when everybody can make a web page.
Re: Colour me impressed. Movie studios dead (Score:1)
Can AI give me a holodeck where I can recreate 1900s Storyville in New Orleans and never leave?
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no, but very soon it can give you a realtime VR experience of it if you are rich enough to pay.. and later it will get cheaper.
Re: Colour me impressed. Movie studios dead (Score:2)
How is cryogenic tech coming along?
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I wonder if you could prompt it just "Take 'A Tale of Two Cities' and make a film from it"., and what would happen.
This is what I want.
In addition to the obvious candidates, I like all sorts of books that have never been dramatized; I would love to just generate a movie or series from them.
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Even if you could make a good movie with prompts only (and remember an image is worth a thousand words), you still need someone to orchestrate it. A movie consists of thousands of scenes and to get your vision into a movie you can't just write "Create a new simpsons episode" but you need to write down every detail. It's the dilemma programmers know from their managers expressing a feature request in two sentences and leaving them guess what the manager may have in mind, only that now the creator is the one
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Even if you could make a good movie with prompts only (and remember an image is worth a thousand words), you still need someone to orchestrate it. A movie consists of thousands of scenes and to get your vision into a movie you can't just write "Create a new simpsons episode" but you need to write down every detail. It's the dilemma programmers know from their managers expressing a feature request in two sentences and leaving them guess what the manager may have in mind, only that now the creator is the one with the two sentences and disappointed by the AI not being able to read their mind to get the actual vision from it.
Maybe.
LLMs can already write multi chapter stories. Not good ones, in my experiments, but hey ...
So there will probably be a range between fully scripted movies, and those generated from merely ideas.
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I believe we already have quite good AI and will see much better. But I don't believe in creativity without control.
Fix the random seed and the system is deterministic. Do not fix it and ... your LLM written story depends only on the random seed.
Can we call this creative? I don't think so. The seed is merely selecting one of the stories the LLM is able to write. One could argue that a long int can select from many many stories, but in practice you'll see the same over and over again.
So how do you make the L
Great, more AI crap (Score:2)
These companies, in their endless greed and strive for dominance, are nothing but a problem now.
Re: Great, more AI crap (Score:1)
So your real problem is with humans? Why not join my Nonviolent Antinatalist cult and use words and your own example alone to show ppl why they should not breed?
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Are you on drugs? I fail to see any connection between my statement and your ramblings.
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Shouldn't you be saying that these AI systems understand nothing? That we can safely ignore all of them as the hype dies down and all the stupid people lose all their money on it?
Are you finally starting to see what is on the horizon?
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Well, you can be (naturally) stupid all you like here, but if you want a real answer you have to do better than this.
The real question (Score:5, Funny)
I know the question that is in everybody's mind:
Will it do porn?
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Depends on how much you're willing to pay. I'm guessing the price for that license will be set at "less than a real actor, but not much less."
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Depending on what you want to happen in that porn movie beyond simple missionary it might be a lot cheaper to get the AI.
Re: The AI revolution - Say "goodbye" to talented: (Score:2)
If I can have AI recreate Louis Armstrong, why do I need any other musician?
Geoblocked outside the US (Score:2)
Thank you Google, for showing the rest of the world (non-US) that we are just second class consumers by locking us out of yet another new Google service. And they still wonder why people distrust and don't like them. Impressive, but I'd take my generative video business elsewhere.
Realistic-looking? (Score:1)
You make it sound negative (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when is it negative, when a lot of users are able to express their creativity.
In before: They are not making it themselves! They have a rather easy way to express their vision, it doesn't matter much if they picked up a camera or not. The point to art is to make the artist's vision into something other people can see. AI generators allow for this. Some people may use them with a simple prompt and get random output, but others work a lot on the result using the provided tools to make it fit their artis
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Since when is it negative
When "users" are scammers, and they "express their creativity" by scamming.
Scamming grandma actually results in much more cash than drawing her as a Studio Ghibli character. So that is what will tend to happen with it.
Re: You make it sound negative (Score:1)
Should we have banned the telephone and internet because of fraudsters?
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No.
Re:You make it sound negative (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that a problem with the user instead of with the general purpose tool?
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Both - I was asked "since when" do these tools cause problems, and the "when" is when certain people get ahold of it.
It was also stated that these tools allow people to "express their creativity", implying that as a positive thing. If we can discuss the positive implications of a tool, we should also be able to discuss its negative implications.
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I think one can discuss a lot of implications and how to handle them, but one should not ignore the reality that the tool is there and is not going away, and it would not be useful to try to ban it.
But we can and should ban using it for certain things. The good news is that most of it is already banned. If you do celebrity fakes, it was illegal doing so with Photoshop and is illegal now to do it with AI as well. If certain uses are not yet covered by laws, we should aim to cover them. Probably not in an AI-
Re:You make it sound negative (Score:5, Interesting)
"Since when is it negative, when a lot of users are able to express their creativity."
I'm an artist/musician/tech nerd... I'll take a shot at that.
Since social media. You can express your creativity any time you want. I sit down an bang out some tunes on a piano every day. I don't have to publish it to express my creativity. In fact, I specifically don't publish anymore because my original creative material will immediately be scraped and repurposed for commercial gain by a third party, without attribution or compensation to myself.
I say "since social media" because, since then, there has been a gigantic misconception propagated everywhere: I have the right to be amplified. No you don't. Big Tech decides if you get amplified, but people, no offense, are too dumb to see that it's not a right, and that someone else, an algorithm presumably, decides what gets amplified.
I'm Instagram. I own the technology. You live within my terms of service. IG has no obligation to amplifying your... lets call it creativity, for the sake of this argument.
As an artist/musician, I see generative AI as a cancer. Yes, anyone who can type can get an AI to generate some garbage. That's not YOUR creativity, and it's arguably not even creative at all. I'm arguing this all over
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Mood this up. Exactly right.
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"Not trying to pick a fight. You have a good question"
I'm happy to have a good discussion and I know there are some counterpoints to the OP.
I still currently see a net positive but I, for example, happily agree that there is much low-quality content online now as it is easier to generate (low-quality) content than before. But the nuanced view on this is, that it is not a problem with people being able to create content, but a problem with sites not being able to sort by quality. More content is not bad, not
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Thank you for a thoughtful discussion.
We are back to your original point I think. I wouldn't disagree, although, my own experience with gen AI is close to nil. I
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"My question is: where do you draw the lines between what you do and what the tool does?"
I think this is the second point. The first point was me defining art (which is really hard and different for each person) as the artist expressing their vision in a way others can perceive it. Maybe even just expressing it without caring about other people to see it.
People say taping a banana to a wall is no art, especially in the arguments about whether AI art is art. I think it is art. I don't think it is effort. I d
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There is no doubt that there are as many reasons to make art as there are people, and that didn't change with new tools. So god bless anyone enjoying the journey.
BUT !! I think you insulted motherhood, and for once, I didn't set out to trap you: Improve
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Maybe one point that may make many things clearer: I neither believe the tech will go away, nor do I think you should ban it, nor can you ban it.
So I always stand on the point to use it for yourself where it is useful (and not where it is not) and to avoid putting energy in fights you can't win. I also do not believe in most doomer scenarios.
Will it change how artists' jobs look like? Yes, quite a bit. But there will still be demand for illustrators who know how to do it without AI. On the other hand, I str
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Critical thought is quite rare online, but its good to see some out there! Cheers.
Re: You make it sound negative (Score:2)
Re: You make it sound negative (Score:1)
"Does the internet have any purpose or value to YOU, at the point where you are only interacting with electronic agents?"
What if human agents just ban me, so AI is all I get? What if no human wants to play Dixieland jazz with me so AI looks like my savior?
Re: You make it sound negative (Score:2)
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Absolutely agree. Furthermore, I see the "democratization" of art to low-effort stuff that anyone can make to be a bad thing. It's not art in my opinion: it's amusement, shallow entertainment, and strengthens the culture of shallowness that pervades advanced western civilization. It is the promotion of the fast-food version of art that just makes everything worse in my opinion.
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That's not YOUR creativity, and it's arguably not even creative at all.
No, it's not your *skill*. There's a difference. The world is full of creative people who lack skill. Using AI tools can help them, but AI doesn't think for itself. Unless you're writing a prompt that says "draw a random picture" you are in fact demonstrating creativity. It's a human vision that AI is attempting to fulfill, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Usually it needs to be tweaked to match expectations. But those expectations are the result of a creative mind.
Dead internet theory (Score:3)
Looking more real every day
ummm (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
The dialog was so bad in those X clips I thought they were French films. :-)