Google’s new AI video tool Veo 3 looks freakishly real, but it might take Hollywood to fully harness its power. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Avishay Artsy, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Help us plan for the future of Today, Explained by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Thank you! Image of Wall Street Journal columnist Jonna Stern and her robot from an AI-generated video. Credit WSJ. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is Google VO3 and how does it work?
A few weeks ago, Google dropped VO3, generative AI video, but now with generative AI sound to go with it. This is video from VO3.
What do you think about the idea that we're just a bunch of prompts?
If I'm generated from a prompt, how come I don't have six fingers?
So is this. About to do the first plunge into an active volcano. Let's send it. And this. Breaking news, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has died after drinking an entire liter of vodka on a dare by RFK.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do filmmakers face with AI video?
This is an artificial intelligence version of Drake and UL is named toe to the X player.
Joanna Stern is a personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal. She is not a filmmaker, but that didn't stop her from trying to harness all the latest AI tools to make a short film.
So I worked on this film with a close friend of mine and producer named Gerard Cole. He works here at The Wall Street Journal, and he's a seasoned audio and video journalist who just really has become obsessed with testing and playing with AI video tools. We started on this project probably at the end of March. I sort of challenged Gerard. I said, hey, we'll make a film.
I think we should try to make something that's like a real film. We come to this place for magic.
I'm going to make him an offer.
I mean, like a two minute short film. It's not Spielberg here. And what was so crazy about it is that every week there would be new tools that would come out. The companies keep getting in touch and saying, well, actually, we have a new update next week. So you might want to hold off on publishing that video or you might want to hold off because we have a new tool that you can test.
And so in May, Google announced VO3, which is their third version of their video model. They also announced a new tool called Flow, which makes it easier to edit with AI video.
And so we kind of had to like uproot the project a little bit to get this going, but this stuff is moving so fast that every night we'd go to sleep, we'd wake up in the morning and there'd be new AI video tool that we thought we should try. The one that has gotten a ton of buzz over the last couple of weeks is Google VO. And this is from Google, this is VO3.
What they did here with VO3 is they just created a new model that really blew people away. Previously with AI video, not only did you kind of have some weird wonkiness to some of the visuals and maybe things didn't look as realistic, but also there was no audio to them. And now with VO3, you can put in a prompt. You can say, a woman working out alongside a robot. And now with VO3, you have audio.
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Chapter 3: How do audiences react to AI-generated videos?
That's the goal of many of these AI companies. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's where it really gets interesting. So some will say, like, look, this is a moment to democratize video tools, right? Those folks who aspire to be filmmakers, well, they can now just do this. They can sit in front of their computer and they can make things that they once never would have been able to make before.
But then you have the other side of this where what might we see on the big screen that might actually be AI generated. And so we've seen a bunch of AI film studios and production houses start popping up. The goal is for the makers, the Googles, the runways of the world to be working with Hollywood.
Their hope is to start working with film studios to generate stuff that will end up in the films we see on the big screen or the small screen, whatever you watch your Netflix on.
You can watch Joanna Stern's short film at wsj.com or on YouTube where it's called, We Tested Google VO and Runway to Create This AI Film, It Was Wild. We're heading to Hollywood in a minute at Today Explained.
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Chapter 4: Can AI be trusted in filmmaking and content creation?
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Chapter 5: What is the future of AI in Hollywood?
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Devin Gordon wrote a big piece titled What If AI is Actually Good for Hollywood for the New York Times Magazine late last year. We asked him, how dare you? Here's what he had to say.
The premise and starting point was... my sense that if you were listening to the discourse about AI in Hollywood, you would either hear that it was going to be the end of Hollywood and wipe out everyone's jobs and turn the future of cinema over to robots, or it was going to be the greatest creative unlocking opportunity magical wand ever handed to creative filmmakers in the history of humankind.
And I had also been hearing and reading these stories in places like the Hollywood Reporter,
Everyone is using AI, but they're scared to admit it. It's the dirty little secret. AI is being used for scripting, for shooting and producing movies.
You go into a little booth that's a 360-degree camera, and you're asked to do 30 different expressions.
And so I was like, okay, well, what are people actually using it for? What is actually happening with AI? So I started with a visual effects company that works with AI called Metaphysic. The reason why I wanted to start with them is because everything I kept hearing was that When AI descended upon Hollywood, it was going to hit visual effects first and hardest.
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Chapter 6: How does AI democratize video production?
Nice to meet you, Mr. Young.
It was directed by Robert Zemeckis. The team from Forrest Gump reunited again using AI technology to a degree that it had not been deployed in a Hollywood movie before. In fact, it was central to the making of it.
She's pregnant. She's what? She's pregnant. Margaret is pregnant.
You're just 18 years old.
In this case, they were using it to enable Tom Hanks to play the same character from the age of 18 to the age of 80. And the way they were able to do that was using metaphysics AI technology. And one of the reasons why I wanted to focus on this movie here which is not a particularly good movie. I wouldn't necessarily recommend you Netflix and chill with it. Get the fuck out of my house.
But I was interested in this movie because this movie is probably the first mainstream Hollywood movie that would not have existed without AI technology. And the reason why is because it's effectively a small domestic company emotional, serious drama. The only reason why this movie could happen is because the visual effects that it required were cheap enough with AI. It's as good as CGI now,
And it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot faster and it gives directors a lot more creative control on the set. So that's why in the visual effects space, there's such this expectation that AI is very quickly and already is in a lot of ways transforming that industry. In good ways, but also in ways that's probably going to cost a lot of people their jobs.
I mean, and let's talk about all those people for a moment here. Let's start with Tom Hanks, because one thing that really surprised me about your piece was that you asked Tom Hanks how he felt about the potential for AI to enable him to star in movies 100 years after his death. Yeah. And he was like, bring it on, right? Yeah.
He was surprisingly unconcerned. Wow. He was just sort of like, well, let's just get the paperwork sorted out. Amazing. And I was a little surprised, to be honest, about how cavalier he was. For instance, I mean, isn't it easy to imagine a scenario, maybe not in the Hanks family, I'm sure the Hanks family is going to, I trust Chet-
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