Latest news with #Veo
Tom's Guide
4 days ago
- Tom's Guide
I used Google's Veo 3 to create AI ASMR food videos
Google's Veo 3 AI video model is a league above any of its competitors for one key reason — sound. You can prompt not just what you see on screen, but also what you hear. Built by Google's DeepMind lab, the first Veo model debuted in May 2024, and each new generation has added more functionality. It has always excelled in motion accuracy and physics understanding compared to competitors, but the addition of sound was a game-changer. You can use it to prompt a short commercial, a scene from a movie you're writing, or even a music video. But there's one use I've seen more than any other — ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response): those gentle tapping, whispering, and ambient sounds that trigger a tingling sensation for some people. To see just how far this could go, I created a series of ASMR food prompts — each designed to generate a matching video and sound around something culinary. Veo 3 is now available in the Gemini app. Just select the Video option when starting a new prompt, type what you want, and an 8-second clip is generated. While Gemini isn't necessarily the best way to access Veo 3 — I'd recommend Freepik, Fal, Higgsfield, or Google Flow — it's easy to use and gets the job done. A key advantage of using Gemini directly is that it automatically interprets and enhances your prompts. So if you ask for 'a cool ASMR video featuring lasagna,' that's what you'll get. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. You can also be more specific using something called structured prompting — labeling each moment with timestamps and scene descriptions. But unless you need precise control, a simple paragraph (aka narrative prompting) is usually more effective. The first task in any AI project is thinking about your prompt. Models are getting better at interpreting intent, but it's still better to be specific if you know what you want. I knew I wanted ASMR food videos, so I started with a test: 'ASMR food video with sound.' The result? Decent. It essentially gave me the lasagna I had in mind. Then I refined it — outlining specific food types, adding sound descriptions, and even trying a structured prompt for a fizzy drink with ice. Most of the time, narrative prompts work best. Just describe what you want to see, the flow of the video, and how sound should come through. The first prompt, 'ASMR food video with sound,' produced a stunning clip of someone sliding a fork into a slice of lasagna. You hear the squish as the fork enters, then the clunk as it hits the plate. This is one case where I wish Veo 3 had an 'extend clip' button. There was no other prompting involved, so I had no way of identifying what the food would be, how the sound would come out or even if the sound would work. This is why it's important to be specific when prompting AI models, even ones in chatbots like Gemini. Next, I went more specific — a longer, narrative-style prompt asking Veo 3 to generate a close-up of a chef preparing and eating satisfying food in a well-lit kitchen. I asked for slow-motion visuals of ingredients being chopped, the sizzling sound of butter melting in a pan, and a crunch as the chef takes a bite. I also added this line: 'Emphasize audio quality: clean, layered ASMR soundscape without music' to direct not just the sound, but to the style of sound and what I don't want to hear. For the final prompt I started with an image. I used Midjourney v7 to create a picture of a woman looking at rainbow popcorn, then added the prompt 'ASMR food' in Gemini. Visually, the result was stunning — but for some reason, the woman says in a voiceover, 'This is delicious, this rainbow popcorn.' That's on me — I didn't specify whether she should speak, or what she should say. A simple fix: put any speech you want in quotes. For example, I could have prompted her to say 'I love to watch popcorn pop,' and emphasized the word pop. I also could've specified that she was speaking on camera — and Veo 3 would have synced the lip movement to match. Overall, Veo 3 delivers impressive results, especially when it comes to generating high-quality sound that accurately reflects the visuals. While there are a few quirks to navigate, like unintended voiceovers or slightly underbaked looking lasagna — these are easily addressed with more specific prompting.
Engadget
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Engadget Podcast: Ancestra director Eliza McNitt defends AI as a creative tool
Eliza McNitt is no stranger to new media. Her 2017 project, Fistful of Stars , was a fascinating look at stellar birth in virtual reality, while her follow-up Spheres explored black holes and the death of stars. Now with her short film Ancestra , McNitt has tapped into Google's AI tools to tell a deeply personal story. Working with Google Deepmind and director Darren Aronofsky's studio Primordial Soup, McNitt used a combination of live-action footage and AI-generated media to tell the story of her own traumatic birth. The result is an uncanny dramatic short where the genuine emotion of the live-action performance wrestles agains the artificiality of AI imagery. The film begins when the lead's (Audrey Corsa, playing McNitt's mother) routine natal care appointment turns into an emergency delivery. From that point on we hear her opine on how her child and all living things in the universe are connected — evoking the poetic nature of Terrence Malick's films. We jump between Corsa's performance, AI footage and macro- and micro-photography. In the end, Corsa holds a baby that was inserted by Google's AI, using prompts that make it look like McNitt as an infant. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. There's no escaping the looming shadow of Google's AI ambitions. This isn't just an art film — it's an attempt at legitimizing the use of AI tools through McNitt's voice. That remains a problem when Google's models, including Veo and other technology from DeepMind, have been trained on pre-existing content and copyrighted works. A prestigious short coming from Darren Aronofsky's production studio isn't enough to erase that original sin. "I was challenged to create an idea that could incorporate AI," McNitt said in an interview on the Engadget Podcast. "And so for me, I wanted to tell a really deeply personal story in a way that I had not been able to before... AI really offered this opportunity to access these worlds where a camera cannot go, from the cosmos to the inner world of being within the mother's womb." This embedded content is not available in your region. When it comes to justifying the use of AI tools, which at the moment can credibly be described as plagiaristic technology, McNitt says that's a decision every artist will have to make for themselves. In the case of Ancestra , she wanted to use AI to accomplish difficult work, like creating a computer generated infant that looked like her, based on photos taken by her father. She found that to be more ethical than bringing in a real newborn, and the results more convincing than a doll or something animated by a CG artist. "I felt the use of AI was really important for this story, and I think it's up to every artist to decide how they wanna use these tools and define that," she said. "That was something else for me in this project where I had to define a really strong boundary where I did not want actors to be AI actors, [they] had to be humans with a soul. I do not feel that an performance can be recreated by a machine. I do deeply and strongly believe that humanity can only be captured through human beings. And so I do think it's really important to have humans at the center of the stories." To that end, McNitt also worked with dozens of artists create the sound, imagery and AI media in Ancestra . There's a worry that AI video tools will let anyone plug in a few prompts and build projects out of low-effort footage, but McNitt says she closely collaborated with a team of DeepMind engineers who crafted prompts and sifted through the results to find the footage she was looking for. (We ran out of time before I could ask her about the environmental concerns from using generative AI, but at this point we know it requires a significant amount of electricity and water. That includes demands for training models as well as running them in cloud.) To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. "I do think, as [generative AI] evolves, it's the responsibility of companies to not be taking copyrighted materials and to respect artists and to set those boundaries, so that artists don't get taken advantage of," McNitt said, when asked about her thoughts on future AI models that compensate artists and aren't built on stolen copyrighted works. "I think that that's a really important part of our role as humans going forward. Because ultimately, These are human stories for other human beings. And so it's, you know, important that we are at the center of that." If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.
Time of India
12-07-2025
- Science
- Time of India
ChatGPT making us dumb & dumber, but we can still come out wiser
Claude Shannon, one of the fathers of AI, once wrote rather disparagingly: 'I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines.' As we enter the age of AI — arguably, the most powerful technology of our times — many of us fear that this prophecy is coming true. Powerful AI models like ChatGPT can create complex essays, poetry and pictures; Google's Veo stitches together cinema-quality videos; Deep Research agents produce research reports at the drop of a prompt. Our innate human abilities of thinking, creating, and reasoning seem to be now duplicated, sometimes surpassed, by AI. This seemed to be confirmed by a recent — and quite disturbing — MIT Media Lab study, 'Your Brain on ChatGPT'. It suggested that while AI tools like ChatGPT help us write faster, they may be making our minds slower. Through a four-month meticulously executed experiment with 54 participants, researchers found that those who used ChatGPT for essay writing exhibited up to 55% lower brain activity, as measured by EEG signals, compared to those who wrote without assistance. If this was not troubling enough, in a later session where ChatGPT users were asked to write unaided, their brains remained less engaged than people without AI ('brain-only' participants, as the study quaintly labelled them). Memory also suffered — only 20% could recall what they had written, and 16% even denied authorship of their own text! The message seemed to be clear: outsourcing thinking to machines may be efficient, but it risks undermining our capacity for deep thought, retention, and ownership of ideas. Technology has always changed us, and we have seen this story many times before. There was a time when you remembered everyone's phone numbers, now you can barely recall your family's, if that. You remembered roads, lanes and routes; if you did not, you consulted a paper map or asked someone. Today, Google and other map apps do that work for us. Facebook reminds us of people's birthdays; email answers suggest themselves, sparing us of even that little effort of thinking. When autonomous cars arrive, will we even remember how to drive or just loll around in our seats as it takes us to our destination? Jonathan Haidt, in his 'The Anxious Generation,' points out how smartphones radically reshaped childhood. Unstructured outdoor play gave way to scrolling, and social bonds turned into notifications. Teen anxiety, loneliness, and attention deficits all surged. From calculators diminishing our mental arithmetic, to GPS weakening our spatial memory, every tool we invent alters us — subtly or drastically. 'Do we shape our tools, or do our tools shape us?' is a quote commonly misattributed to Marshall McLuhan but this question is hauntingly relevant in the age of AI. If we let machines do the thinking, what happens to our human capacity to think, reflect, reason, and learn? This is especially troubling for children, and more so in India. For one, India has the highest usage of ChatGPT globally. Most of it is by children and young adults, who are turning into passive consumers of AI-generated knowledge. Imagine a 16-year-old using ChatGPT to write a history essay. The output might be near-perfect, but what has she actually learned? The MIT study suggests — very little. Without effortful recall or critical thinking, she might not retain concepts, nor build the muscle of articulation. With exams still based on memory and original expression, and careers requiring problem-solving, this is a silent but real risk. The real questions, however, are not whether the study is correct or is exaggerating, or whether AI is making us dumber or not, but what can we do about it. We definitely need some guardrails and precautions, and we need to start building them now. I believe that we should teach ourselves and our children to: Ask the right questions: As answers become commodities, asking the right questions will be the differentiator. We need to relook at our education system and pedagogy and bring back this unique human skill of curiosity. Intelligence is not just about answers. It is about the courage to think, to doubt, and to create Invert classwork and homework: Reserve classroom time for 'brain-only' activities like journaling, debates, and mental maths. Homework can be about using AI tools to learn what will be discussed in class the next day. AI usage codes: Just as schools restrict smartphone use, they should set clear boundaries for when and how AI can be used. Teacher-AI synergy: Train educators to use AI as a co-teacher, and not a crutch. Think of AI as Augmented Intelligence, not an alternative one. Above all, make everyone AI literate: Much like reading, writing, and arithmetic were foundational in the digital age, knowing how to use AI wisely is the new essential skill of our time. AI literacy is more than just knowing prompts. It means understanding when to use AI, and when not to; how to verify AI output for accuracy, bias, and logic; how to collaborate with AI without losing your own voice, and how to maintain cognitive and ethical agency in the age of intelligent machines. Just as we once taught 'reading, writing, adding, multiplying,' we must now teach 'thinking, prompting, questioning, verifying.' History shows that humans adapt. The printing press did not destroy memory; calculators did not end arithmetic; smartphones did not abolish communication. We evolved with them—sometimes clumsily, but always creatively. Today, with AI, the challenge is deeper because it imitates human cognition. In fact, as AI challenges us with higher levels of creativity and cognition, human intelligence and connection will become even more prized. Take chess: a computer defeated Gary Kasparov in chess back in 1997; since then, a computer or AI can defeat any chess champion hundred times out of hundred. But human 'brains-only' chess has become much more popular now, as millions follow D Gukesh's encounters with Magnus Carlsen. So, if we cultivate AI literacy and have the right guardrails in place; if we teach ourselves and our children to think with AI but not through it, we can come out wiser, not weaker. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Campaign ME
11-07-2025
- Business
- Campaign ME
Google launches Flow & Gemini's photo-to-video capability in MENA
With over 40 million Veo 3 videos generated across the Gemini app and Flow over the last seven weeks. Google is now launching a new photo-to-video capability in Gemini, allowing creators and artists to transform their favorite photos into dynamic eight-second video clips with sound. Google is also launching Flow, the only AI filmmaking tool custom-designed for Google's most advanced models — Veo, Imagen and Gemini. Flow can help storytellers explore their ideas without bounds and create cinematic clips and scenes for their stories. Users can get creative by animating everyday objects, bringing their drawings and paintings to life or adding movement to nature scenes. Once the video is complete, users can tap the share button or download it to share with friends and family. To turn photos into videos, select 'Videos' from the tool menu in the prompt box and upload a photo. Then, describe the scene and any audio instructions, and watch as the selected still image transforms into a dynamic video. Flow comes with a range of features for professionals or those just getting started: Camera Controls : Master some shots with direct control over camera motion, angles and perspectives. : Master some shots with direct control over camera motion, angles and perspectives. Scenebuilder : Seamlessly edit and extend existing shots — revealing more of the action or transitioning to what happens next with continuous motion and consistent characters. : Seamlessly edit and extend existing shots — revealing more of the action or transitioning to what happens next with continuous motion and consistent characters. Asset Management: Easily manage and organize all of the ingredients and prompts. The new capability is available to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers across the Middle East and North Africa, starting today. All generated videos include a visible watermark to show they are AI-generated and an invisible SynthID digital watermark.
Indian Express
11-07-2025
- Indian Express
Google Gemini adds AI photo-to-video feature: Try it now in 3 easy steps
Google Gemini, the default digital assistant on modern Android devices, is getting a new feature that can turn your still photos into videos. Powered by its most powerful video generation model – Veo 3, the tech giant says users can now transform their favourite 'photos into dynamic eight-second video clips with sound.' In a blog post, Google says the new feature allows users to get creative by letting them do things like animating everyday objects, bringing drawings and paintings to life and adding motion to nature scenes. Once generated, these videos can then be downloaded for later use or shared with friends or family. When you turn your images into videos, Google Gemini will automatically add a visible watermark to indicate that they are generated using AI alongside an invisible SynthID digital watermark. You can also give Gemini feedback on these Veo 3-generated videos using the thumbs-up or down button. Here are some examples of images that were transformed into videos using the new tool, along with their prompts below the video. Prompt: The cat sees a mouse nearby and jumps to catch it. Prompt: Move the clouds and make the bird fly in circles. Also, add some more birds. Prompt: Make the phone move for a couple of seconds. Bringing photos to life using the new Gemini feature is really simple. 1. To do so, open Gemini on the web or your favourite device and tap on the 'Video' button located in the bottom bar. 2. Now, upload the picture you want to transform into a video by tapping on the '+' button from the bottom bar. 3. Describe what you want to do with it in the text box below, tap on the send button, and you are good to go. Gemini will take anywhere between a minute to two to turn your still image into a video, after which you can choose to download or share it. The MP4 videos have an aspect ratio of 16:9, with a 720p (HD) resolution. When we tried turning photos into videos, Gemini was unable to make videos from images of real people, but the feature worked really well with photos of nature scenes, pets and objects. Here are some samples of videos generated using the new image-to-video feature. Currently available for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the new photo-to-video feature will be rolling out to users in select countries starting July 11, which means you might have to wait a while if it isn't available on your account right now.
