Google’s updated Veo model can make vertical videos from reference images with 4k upscaling
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This fucking technology needs to be destroyed. I'm not even being hyperbolic. It's absolute fucking cancer that benefits NO ONE except those who use it to harm.
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Yes, someday it’ll do something amazing. Right now you’ll just have to tolerate it creating propaganda indistinguishable from reality. Off the top of my head:
• Fake Venezuelans celebrating Maduro’s death.
• Fake black women complaining about losing SNAP benefits because they can’t afford to get their nails done.
• ICE watch groups getting inundated with fake photo and video reports of kidnappings, wasting volunteer time and keeping community members confused and disengaged.
• Fake videos of protesters burning shit and assaulting ICE agents.
So thats what it does RIGHT NOW.
But soon it will stop doing all the bad shit and start doing lots of amazing things that are SO good, actually. Just sit tight. Sorry about the CSAM & abetting the descent into fascism. You’ll get cancer cures soon!!
• Fake Venezuelans celebrating Maduro’s death.
• Fake black women complaining about losing SNAP benefits because they can’t afford to get their nails done.
• ICE watch groups getting inundated with fake photo and video reports of kidnappings, wasting volunteer time and keeping community members confused and disengaged.
• Fake videos of protesters burning shit and assaulting ICE agents.
So thats what it does RIGHT NOW.
But soon it will stop doing all the bad shit and start doing lots of amazing things that are SO good, actually. Just sit tight. Sorry about the CSAM & abetting the descent into fascism. You’ll get cancer cures soon!!
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jonbob_newcastle
Ars Praetorian
Any video that is precisely eight seconds long should be treated with the utmost suspicion.
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Absolutely stunning technical achievement.
Getting ever closer to the holy grail: Automated banner ads.
Combine this tech with tracking and advertisers can Just-In-Time ads tailored to each account.
Getting ever closer to the holy grail: Automated banner ads.
Combine this tech with tracking and advertisers can Just-In-Time ads tailored to each account.
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This is totally what they are going to use this tech for. The perfectly tuned slop ad that will get you to always do what it wants. Well, that's the hope.
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I think I might most impressed by the racoon coffee shop owner. The assumed "interviewer" blocks the whole screen for a moment and yet the background remains consistent afterwards as far as I can see.
I definitely acknowledge the criticisms already in thread that right now this technology is potentially more dangerous than valuable however.
I definitely acknowledge the criticisms already in thread that right now this technology is potentially more dangerous than valuable however.
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The sad thing is that given how badly "targeted" ads miss the mark with me now they won't even get that right.
Car insurance when I can't see well enough to drive, foreign-language text when the only things I speak are English and Bad English, liquor ads when I'm too boring to be a drinker, random lab equipment when I'm a software developer, and so on.
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Not hyperbolic at all. There's no benefit to this. Real people can just film their own videos. All this does is enable deepfakes and scams and all sorts of other bad things
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I get people doing that, but I'd like the sites I visit to get that .0001 cent of revenue to keep the lights on.
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Damnit. Any time my dog is doing something cute, I can only get 8-10 seconds of video.
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I use uBlock origin, but disable it on sites I trusts. My go to recipe blogger, the web comics that have one ad, etc. Sites I subscribe to their RSS feed. A few of the sites get blocked again, but surprisingly few.
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Porn and fraud. Those are the only use cases I can think of.
IOW it's creating exactly what the oligarchs want.
IOW it's creating exactly what the oligarchs want.
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Speaking as someone in the US, the money being burned on AI (infrastructure and energy) has to be in the tens -- if not hundreds -- of billions.
Imagine if that money was used to:
Imagine if that money was used to:
- Eradicate cancer
- End homelessness
- Feed the population
- Rebuild our schools (and pay our teachers)
- ...nearly anything else BUT "make line go up"
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Pretty much all of those issues can't be simply solved with money (except for rebuild our schools).
Cancer has money being poured into it, but it's such a hard set of problems.
Homelessness has a lot to do with policy - can we medicate and hold people against their will?
Feed Population - I used to say SNAP did this, but Trump cut that. It's not a money thing, it's cause Trump is heartless.
Rebuild Schools - This is all based on local property taxes - convince your neighbors to vote for higher taxes.
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It is the future, the future always scares the one that comes from the past.
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Funding sources can be changed.
The usual American model of "better schools in richer neighbourhoods" makes no sense at all and perpetuates the status quo.
I think the original poster meant more something akin to: "it is so much money we could fund all schools on Earth without charging a single penny of tax and every teacher could be driving a Lamborghini, every student could get a Lamborghini at age 18 and we would still have at least 500bn in the bank".
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Well that is definitely not true.
K-12 schools spend ~$900 billion per year on students (~$17,000 per student).
There's ~4 million teachers, so a Lambo each ~$200,000 would be $800 billion on top of that.
If you gave every graduating class of ~4 million students a Lambo it would be another ~$800 billion per year on top of that.
Total AI spending in 2025 was ~$200 billion.
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I feel deprived now. FOMO is strong. /s
Here I use UBlock and see NO ads at all.
I DO see a lot of bitching about me using uBlock, though, which I find infinitely more acceptable than pretty much any ad I've been exposed to online.
Even if I didn't use uBlock, considering I'm not very much like the people in the demographic I live in, I'd be getting ads for shit I hate and would, in a different reality, gleefully nuke from orbit. My browsing history would reveal that I'm all over the map and any ad algorithm I'd be likely to encounter would have a total meltdown trying to match my history to my preferences to shoot an ad at me I wouldn't nail on the fly.
I support sites I like by pay a sub. Ars included. That way, I don't see ads when I don't want to see ads, and use uBlock so I don't see ads when I don't want to see ads, too.
TBF, though, back in the day, as a kid, I was never that interested in women's hygiene products, but those served as sources of huge entertainment when I'd ask my mom what that was all about. Ads these days aren't nearly as entertaining that way.
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I never understood what was so difficult about turning your phone to watch video content in the proper 16:9 format but apparently people have already been conditioned to think of "mobile video" as being vertical because they cannot be bothered to perform this simple action.
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AI is cool i guess
Ars Centurion
the genie doesn't care about your aspect ratio
reading these comments is like listening to radio djs in 1950 complain that tv is going to ruin society.
the same people who cheered for "democratizing art" are now furious that google just handed hollywood-grade vfx tools to every kid with a smartphone.
the only difference now is the marginal cost of production has hit zero.
we are entering the age of infinite media. complaining that it's "vertical video" or "slop" is missing the point. the point is that the barrier to entry for high-fidelity storytelling just evaporated.
if you can't adapt to a world where "seeing is believing" is no longer true, you are going to have a very hard decade. authenticity will be cryptographically signed (c2pa) or it won't exist. get used to it.
ps- speaking of venezuela, how else would we get our psyops in record time if it wasn't for ai? this ai anime has more and better animation than the entire season of one punch man season 3
(pss- make sure you keep watching after the credits)
reading these comments is like listening to radio djs in 1950 complain that tv is going to ruin society.
lol, calm down. it is a video generation tool.
the same people who cheered for "democratizing art" are now furious that google just handed hollywood-grade vfx tools to every kid with a smartphone.
disinformation existed before AI. photoshop existed before AI. deepfakes existed before Veo 3.1.
the only difference now is the marginal cost of production has hit zero.
we are entering the age of infinite media. complaining that it's "vertical video" or "slop" is missing the point. the point is that the barrier to entry for high-fidelity storytelling just evaporated.
if you can't adapt to a world where "seeing is believing" is no longer true, you are going to have a very hard decade. authenticity will be cryptographically signed (c2pa) or it won't exist. get used to it.
ps- speaking of venezuela, how else would we get our psyops in record time if it wasn't for ai? this ai anime has more and better animation than the entire season of one punch man season 3
(pss- make sure you keep watching after the credits)
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There might be a silver lining in all this.
We're already at the point where most social media is completely dominated by AI slop, and it's increasingly difficult to distinguish from real images and video.
Rather than being the downfall of humanity, I see this as the downfall of social media as it now exists. The only reliable source of information is going to be traditional news media, run by actual journalists. In fact, that was always the case, but the AI revolution should make it obvious to everyone.
I've already entirely abandoned social media because of this, and I can't say I'm any worse off for it.
We're already at the point where most social media is completely dominated by AI slop, and it's increasingly difficult to distinguish from real images and video.
Rather than being the downfall of humanity, I see this as the downfall of social media as it now exists. The only reliable source of information is going to be traditional news media, run by actual journalists. In fact, that was always the case, but the AI revolution should make it obvious to everyone.
I've already entirely abandoned social media because of this, and I can't say I'm any worse off for it.
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No, there is also these things called hope and optimism that people used to have. Perhaps you're young enough that you've never heard of it? So all's well that's erased from collective memory well, I guess...
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I actually played with Google Flow briefly today. To say it's "Crap in a box" would be an understatement. Yes you can feed it an image, and it will create a video from it. But the output is highly variable. Colors change and strange behavior abounds. I fed it several pictures of heavy construction equipment (bulldozer, and backhoe). It couldn't tell the difference between one piece of equipment or another. This led to some really weird outputs. Backhoe with the excavator arm on the front, a bulldozer in frame with an excavator arm, a van chopped into the shape of a truck. Some outputs looked nothing like the input image. You can only upload one image at a time, and then have to crop each image to the output 16:9 or vertical format. Giving iterative instructions for the output, or even having Flow reference a different frame for consistency is supposed to be possible. But to be honest the user interface for Flow is so clunky, poorly designed, and slow it's painful to use.
As others have said, this seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Flow itself is too slow, awkward, and inaccurate to be used for any kind of pro-sumer or professional purpose. Which leaves it entirely in the realm of novelty. I'm not sure how Google plans to make money of of this ($123.05/month discounted from $229.30 for Google AI Ultra for business? Yeah, no thanks). Back in the day I worked on camp staff. We'd go through an exercise with the staff about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. One person would give instructions, and another would follow them literally...to hilarious results. That is what using Flow/Veo is like.
Other than for making garbage videos for the sake of manipulating information this seems like a waste of time.
As others have said, this seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Flow itself is too slow, awkward, and inaccurate to be used for any kind of pro-sumer or professional purpose. Which leaves it entirely in the realm of novelty. I'm not sure how Google plans to make money of of this ($123.05/month discounted from $229.30 for Google AI Ultra for business? Yeah, no thanks). Back in the day I worked on camp staff. We'd go through an exercise with the staff about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. One person would give instructions, and another would follow them literally...to hilarious results. That is what using Flow/Veo is like.
Other than for making garbage videos for the sake of manipulating information this seems like a waste of time.
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"I, for one, welcome our "vertical format" overlords" /s PS- my eyes are arranged in a horizontal format, at least for now- sigh...
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That's true but also doesn't really address the other user's point. It's about the relative merits of what the money is being spent on. Even though it wouldn't simply solve the root causes, $100 billion spent on any of those things would be better than $100 billion spent on this meritless AI garbage.
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Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllll, you don't have to give everyone a Lambo every year!!! =)))))
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You get: the ability to generate some cute video of cats.
We get: billions more dollars.
You also get: unmitigated misinformation, non-consensual porno videos of your wives and daughters, and a general dumbing down of society, not to mention countless other problems I’m too tired/annoyed to bother thinking of right now.
Please just stop.
We get: billions more dollars.
You also get: unmitigated misinformation, non-consensual porno videos of your wives and daughters, and a general dumbing down of society, not to mention countless other problems I’m too tired/annoyed to bother thinking of right now.
Please just stop.
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They need to come up with a framework where someone can pay, say $10/month, and then web sites could opt into the program and that $10 would get split up for all the web sites you visited that month. It would be tough to do while still respecting privacy, but I bet it could be done. I'd sign up for something like that. Maybe the amount could even be chosen by the user so that some users might choose $20/month or more.
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I'd do that.
Sites like Fandom and TomsHardware don't offer ad-free options and can be unusable because of the ads triggering endless page refreshes. I gave up on reading Toms on my iPad with Safari because it was often impossible to finish reading a page because the refresh would jump back to top of page, and scrolling down would trigger another refresh. Times like that I'm really tempted to install the adblocker.
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