Since Google released its VEO 3 AI model last week, users of social media have had fun with his ability to quickly generate very realistic eight-second clips, complete with sound and lip-synchronized dialogue. The Tiktok algorithm has served me many VEO-generated videos with impossible challenges, fake news reports and even surrealistic short narrative films, to name only a few popular archetypes.
Among all video experiments generated by AI, I have also noticed a surprising counter-trend on my tap feed. In the midst of all the videos of Avatars generated by VEO that occur as real people, there are now also a number of videos of real people who occur as Avatars generated by VEO.
“This must be real. There is no way to be AI.”
I came across this trend when the Tiktok algorithm fed me this video with the extra large caption “Google Veo 3 This is 100% AI.” While I looked and listened to the alleged AI-generated band that seemed to play in the busy corner of someone's living room, I read the caption with the supposed promptly that the clip had generated: “A group of brothers with beards playing rock music in 6/8 with an accordion.”
@kongosmusicwe are so cooked. This took 3 minutes to generate. Simple prompt: “A group of brothers who play rock music in 6/8 with an accordion” ♬ original sound – kongos
After a few seconds of taking those captions at nominal value, something started to feel a bit. After a few seconds I finally noticed that the video was posted by Kongos, an indie band that you might recognize from their little hit “Come with me now”. And after a little digging, I discovered that the band in the video was actually just Congos, and the melody was a 9-year song that the band had dressed as an AI-creation to get attention.
Here is the sad: it worked! Without the “Look what Veo 3 did!” Hook, I may quickly scroll through this video before I took the time to listen to the (pretty good!) Song. The novel Ai Angle made sure that I stopped long enough to pay attention to a Kongos number for the first time in more than ten years.
