Google Gemini — the tech giant’s generative AI video model — is launching the ability to generate social media-ready vertical video. That’s all well and good, but it raises the question: Does that mean even more AI slop?
Google Veo is widely regarded as the leading AI video model (different versions of Veo claim the top four spots on LMArena’s text-to-video leaderboard), so the answer is almost certainly yes.
Google announced this week that Veo 3.1 — the latest version of Gemini’s text-to-video generator — could now generate “social-ready 9:16 videos directly.” In other words, the videos are generated with the vertical, scroll-ready format that you see on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.
“Designed for mobile-first applications, this mode delivers faster results and optimized composition by generating full-frame vertical video rather than cropping from landscape,” read a statement from Google.
The online world is increasingly populated by AI-generated vertical video, some of which is the much-maligned slop. Meta, for instance, launched Vibes, a social site entirely dedicated to generating and scrolling AI videos. AI critics call it an “infinite slop machine.”
It tracks that Google would give users the ability to generate social-ready video — people want it — but it might not make your scrolling experience any better.
