At the Google I/O 2025 event on May 20, Google announced the release of Veo 3, a new AI video generation model that makes 8-second videos. Within hours of its release, AI artists and filmmakers were showing off shockingly realistic videos. You may have even seen some of these videos in your social media feeds and not realized they were artificially generated.
To be blunt: We've never seen anything like Veo 3 before. It's impressive. It's scary. And it's only going to get better.
Misinformation experts have been warning for years that we will eventually reach a point where it's impossible for the average person to tell the difference between an AI video and the real thing. With Veo 3, we have officially stepped out of the uncanny valley and into a new era, one where AI videos are a fact of life.
While several other AI video makers exist, most notably Sora from OpenAI, the clips made by Veo 3 instantly stand out in your timeline. Veo 3 brought with it several innovations that separate it from other video generation tools. Crucially, in addition to video, Veo 3 also produces audio and dialogue. It doesn't just offer photorealism, but fully realized soundscapes and conversations to go along with videos. It can also maintain consistent characters in different video clips, and users can fine-tune camera angles, framing, and movements in entirely new ways. On social media, many users are dumbfounded by the results.
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Veo 3 is available to use now with Google's paid AI plans. Users can access the tool in Gemini, Google's AI chatbot, and in Flow, an “AI filmmaking tool built for creatives, by creatives,” per Google.
Already, AI filmmakers are using Veo 3 to create short films, and it's only a matter of time until we see a full-length film powered by Veo 3.
Meet the filmmakers making short films with Veo 3
On X, YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit, users are sharing some of the most impressive Veo 3 videos. If you're not on your guard and simply casually scrolling your feed, you might not think twice about whether the videos are real or not.
The short film "Influenders" is one of the most widely shared short films made with Veo 3. "Influenders" was created by Yonatan Dor, the founder of the AI visual studio The Dor Brothers. In the movie, a series of influencers react as an unexplained cataclysm occurs in the background. The video has hundreds of thousands of views across various platforms.
"Yes, we used Google Veo 3 exclusively for this video, but to make a piece like this really come to life we needed to do further sound design, clever editing and some upscaling at the end," Dor said in an email to Mashable. "The full piece took around 2 days to complete." Dor added, "Veo 3 is a massive step forward, it’s easily the most advanced tool available publicly right now. We're especially impressed by its dialogue and prompt adherence capabilities."
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Similar videos featuring man-on-the-street videos have also gone viral, with artists like Alex Patrascu and Impekable showing off Veo 3's capabilities. And earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal reporter made an entire short film starring a virtual version of herself using Veo 3. All this in just 10 days.
In "Influenders" and these other videos, some of the clips and characters are more realistic than others. Many still have the glossy aesthetic and jerky camera movements that are a signature of AI videos, a clear giveaway that's similar to the ChatGPT em dash.
Just a couple of years ago, AI creations with too many fingers and other obvious anatomical abnormalities were commonplace. If the technology keeps progressing at this pace, there will soon be no obvious difference between real video and AI video.
A tool for creativity and misinformation
In promoting Veo 3, Google is eager to stress its partnerships with artists and filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky. And it's clear that Veo 3 could drastically reduce the cost of creating animation and special effects. But for content farms and bad actors producing fake news and manipulative outrage bait, Veo 3 is equally powerful.
We asked Google about the potential for Veo 3 to be used for misinformation, and the company said that safeguards such as digital watermarks are built into Veo 3 video clips.
"It’s important that people can access provenance tools for videos and other content they see online," a representative with Google DeepMind told Mashable via email. "The SynthID watermark is embedded in all content generated by Google’s AI tools, and our SynthID detector rolled out to early testers last week. We plan to expand access more broadly soon, and as an additional step to help people, we’re adding a visible watermark to Veo videos."
Google also has AI safety guidelines that it uses, and the company says it wants to "help people and organizations responsibly create and identify AI-generated content."
A screenshot from an AI-generated video made by Google with Veo 3. Credit: Google
But does the average person stop to ask whether the images and videos on their timelines and FYP are real? As the viral emotional support kangaroo proves, they do not.
There's zero doubt that AI videos are about to become even more commonplace on social media and video apps. That will include plenty of AI slop, but also videos with more nefarious purposes. Despite safeguards built into AI video generation tools, skilled AI artists can create deepfake videos featuring celebrities and public figures. TV news anchors speaking into the camera have also been a recurring theme in Veo 3 videos so far, which has worrying implications for the information ecosystem online.
If you're not already asking "Is this real?" when you come across a video clip online, now is the time to start.
Or, as a chorus of voices are saying on X, "We're so cooked."
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
