Oh Jesus The New AI Video Model: I have tried to minimise the amount of ‘LOOK NEW AI THING’ over the past few months because, well, lots of people hate it and frankly it gets tedious pointing to slow, incremental progress – I WANT SHINY MILESTONES FFS! Which, conveniently, is exactly what Google provided this week with the announcement and partial launch (expensive tier, US-only, limited access for now) of Veo3, a text-to-video model which is just orders of magnitude better than pretty much anything else I’ve yet seen and which does the frankly-magic-feeling trick of creating audio along with the video – meaning that you don’t need to create a separate audio track or use lipsyncing addons or anything to create...actually really fcuking realistic looking clips of upto 8 seconds. Seriously, click the main link – then click this one, and then click this one, and take a moment to think about what this is going to do to anyone’s ability to tell what is real and fake, particularly when they’re scrolling past a stamp-sized clip on a phonescreen. Given that just last month a bunch of (admittedly stupid, mad, and almost-certainly racist/homophobic) people across Twitter became convinced that there was ACTUAL CCTV FOOTAGE of Keir Starmer and Lord Alli having a passionate clinch circulating online despite the fact said footage was very, very clearly a shonky AI-generated monstrosity, it’s not hard to imagine the sort of mad, febrile imaginings a few well-conceived spoofed clips of this sort of quality would lead to. And yes, it’s Google, so this will be guardrail to fcuk – but, as we’ve seen, the moats on this stuff don’t really appear to exist anymore, and, based on the pace of open source models and the rate at which they appear to be catching up with the big ones, you’re going to be able to download and tweak something this good in, what, ~9 months? THIS IS COMING AND IT IS UNSTOPPABLE AND NOONE SEEMS TO CARE (and, look, if you work in low-end advertising then I am sorry but your job is fcuked). The important thing to note here – aside from the increasing inevitability of an absolute epistemological crisis brought about my simulated media – is that AI is now...actually quite good in many cases, and lots of people don’t realise quite how much because they only fcuk with the free versions of stuff – if you haven’t played around with the toys for a while it’s worth digging back into it and realising where we are. I mean, even the terrible song-generating engines are getting...less terrible – for reasons that now escape me I was talking with a friend about how ‘My Boyfriend Would Suck As An Escort’ felt like a pop-punk song title, and asked Suno to spin it up out of curiosity and...look, I’m not saying this is good, but I have totally been humming the fcuking chorus.

Webcurios 23/05/25 – webcurios