Google Vids gets AI avatars powered by Gemini

An AI-generated adaptation of Homer's Odyssey is heading to screens around the same time as Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated live-action version, prompting pointed questions about the role of fully synthetic filmmaking in cinema. The comparison between the two projects throws into sharp relief what generative video tools can and cannot yet replicate. A PetaPixel writer argues the AI film is notably lacking in the human qualities that make storytelling resonate.

Google is expanding its Vids platform with personalized AI avatars that allow users to appear in videos as a digital version of themselves. The update also brings Gemini Omni-powered tools for generating and editing video content from text prompts and reference images.

Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has revealed that generative AI has been used across 300 titles on the platform, with the docuseries "The American Experiment" featuring 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage. Sarandos framed the technology as a tool to expand what creators can do rather than replace them. The comments offer one of the most concrete public accounts yet of how a major streaming service is integrating AI into its content pipeline.

NVIDIA and Hugging Face have joined forces to bring large-scale fine-tuning of image and video diffusion models into the NeMo Automodel framework, integrated with the Diffusers library. The collaboration aims to make distributed training more accessible for teams working with models that would otherwise be difficult to fine-tune on limited hardware. The result is a more streamlined path from a pretrained diffusion model to a customized one, without requiring deep infrastructure expertise.

San Francisco's city attorney has sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google, demanding they remove 13 so-called "nudify" apps from their platforms. These apps use generative AI to digitally undress images of real people without their consent, raising serious legal and ethical concerns. The action marks one of the more direct legal interventions by a local authority targeting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery.

TikTok is piloting an opt-in tool that scans the platform for AI-generated likenesses of creators, allowing them to report unauthorized uses to the company. The test is currently limited to a subset of US creators and requires identity verification through a third-party service. YouTube recently launched a comparable feature for all adult users.