Google's Veo 3 AI Disarray Has Taken a Giant Leap Forward

Just when I thought I met my slop quota for the month, Google had to go ahead and pile on. With Veo 3, AI-generated video has reached a whole new and stupefying level. YouTube slop; video game slop; VR slop; app slop—you name it. All of that slop, however interesting, disheartening, or inane, has been pretty low stakes, but apparently it’s all pointed in one direction, and that’s straight for prime time.

On Thursday night, Veo 3 made its debut as a tool for AI advertising, becoming the engine behind this commercial for the financial services company Kalshi, which aired during the NBA finals. This isn’t the first AI-generated ad—those have been happening for a little while now and were a pretty major theme at this past year’s Super Bowl—but it’s certainly an ascension for Veo 3, which was just unveiled at Google’s I/O conference last month. But just because AI ads aren’t new doesn’t mean the idea of video generation didn’t simultaneously reach new heights and new lows.

As you can see from the creator of the ad (or I guess prompter in this case), PJ Ace, the whole process was rife with Google AI, from ideation to generation. “Kalshi asked me to create a spot about people betting on various markets, including the NBA Finals,” wrote Ace on X. “I said the best Veo 3 content is crazy people doing crazy things while showcasing your brand.” After the initial idea—which was apparently a thematic mashup of GTA and Florida—Ace used a mixture of Gemini and ChatGPT to help write and devise the script, and then took those ideas and had Gemini literally write a prompt that he could feed into Veo 3. That’s right, folks, he had AI prompt itself, and that’s how a prime-time ad was born.

The result looks about on par with what we’ve seen other people generating with Veo 3. The visuals themselves are realistic, but you’ll notice that each scene in the ad is very short. That’s because Veo 3 still has trouble with continuity. Even in Google’s curated demos of its new video generation model last month, including this action schlock AI slopfest, things get weird when you try to stitch coherent scenes together. Though Google’s AI filmmaking tool, Flow, is made for creating longer, coherent AI videos, allowing you to describe angles and characters and retain them across scenes, things still get wonky. The aforementioned action-oriented AI slopfest is full of strange scenes of a SWAT team shooting at nothing and jarring camera angle shifts that make the fact it was AI-generated pretty obvious.

Ace says his ad took him all of two days to create and “300-400 generations,” so clearly this isn’t quite waving a magic wand-type technology yet. Though, as Ace points out, it did effectively kill a lot of jobs on what would have been a much bigger payroll. Ace estimates that the whole thing was about a “95 percent cost reduction” as opposed to “traditional ads.” There’s a lot to unpack here, and based on the limitations I just described above, I don’t think we can herald Veo 3 in as the new, preferred method of advertising, but the job-killing potential for this type of technology is undoubtedly high. And if there’s a way to cut costs, you can bet your ass that we’ll see a lot more of this kind of AI slop in the near future.

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