Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points.

For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau...

Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.

It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and a few distinct narrators:

* https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png

* https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png

* https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png

Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead.

It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.

Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.

I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision.

All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression

Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.

recently I encountered several youtubers in the uncanny valley of "is it Ai or really repetitive intonation pattern"

one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera

the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally

and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs?

I feel sad

A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job.

It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.

Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).

The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.

For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.

It is in their business interest to ignore Firefox.

Firefox really struggle with demo pages of text-to-video models because of the large numbers of videos in the page in my experience, this page seems to work quite fine for me tho.

Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models.

The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening.

I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.

Why do they need to? For search, instant models are more important and fit the use case better.

Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.

Google has always been committed to multimodal.

And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora

And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI.

Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model.

OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.

10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.

This is paid API access only. They are here to make money not to position themselves for an IPO. Not a value judgement only an observation.

Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data

You knew upfront that it was generated. I did too so the first thing I did was look at the lips of the actors convincing myself that there were flaws.

When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.

I don't think I can see the difference. I just have my skin crawl because I'm expecting to see something off and generally have a bad feeling about it.

Something in their eyes. Looks very robotic / lifeless for me. And the sound-mixing is very off. Clearly feels like the voice was layered on top of whatever sound is in the background and not blended.

> Google is search.

Implicit to that is "find". Their AI integration into search has really hit its stride for me. They have that search box (or speech prompt) hard wired into people and they are finally iterating and crafting AI into that experience. They really failed hard initially.

I know others have worse experiences than me but Google knows a lot about me so maybe that affects my results. YMMV