It’s been a little over a month since Google launched Veo 3, a new tool for generating video using AI. In an article for The Verge around the time of the tool’s launch, Allison Johnson raised the alarm about Veo 3’s implications. “[W]hile I don’t think it’s going to propel us to a misinformation doomsday just yet, Veo 3 strikes me as an absolute AI slop machine,” Johnson wrote. She also called its videos “realistic as hell.”
And now, it seems that terrible racists have found the tool and are using it to make terrible, racist videos.
That’s the big takeaway from a new report from the media watchdog group Media Matters for America. According to the report, users have been using Veo 3 to create videos featuring “videos in which protesters are run over by cars” and “reenacting marginalized groups’ historical traumas” — as well as videos that traffic in outright racist stereotypes. The videos, Media Matters noted, are labeled with tags or descriptions specifying that they were created using Veo 3.
Media Matters’ report goes into some of the imagery featured in these videos; in short, it’s really bad and incredibly racist. What’s even worse is that people seem to be tuning in to them: many of the videos cited in the report had hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, while some exceeded one million views.
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Is AI behind your next favorite band?What makes things even worse, as Ryan Whitwam pointed out at Ars Technica, is that videos like these are not permissable under TikTok’s terms of use. “We do not allow any hate speech, hateful behavior, or promotion of hateful ideologies,” the company stated on its Community Guidelines page. “This includes explicit or implicit content that attacks a protected group.”
That leads to another unsettling thought: if hateful content is disseminated to hundreds of thousands of people despite it being a clear violation of a given platform’s regulations, what can be done to make enforcement at this scale possible?
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