I tried Gemini's free new movie maker; Hollywood has absolutely nothing to worry about

AI videos are, depending on who you speak to, the biggest leap forward in filmography we've seen in decades, or a scourge on the internet.

Regardless of where you fall on that, one fact remains true: videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti sure have come a long way in the last few years.

Google released its new video editing platform, and it comes with free use of its AI video generator. While there's no mobile app, you can access it on a computer.

I decided to give it a whirl so you know whether it's any good. And it is! But Hollywood certainly shouldn't be worried yet.

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Posts By  Irene Okpanachi

It's so easy to use

But there's plenty of depth

Loading up Google Vids for the first time, I was struck by a vision from the past: Windows Movie Maker.

Some video editing software can be complicated, with a steep learning curve. Google Vids is not one of those. It's a simple in-line editor.

You take videos from the sidebar on the right, and plonk them down onto the line at the bottom of the screen. If you want to put a video before the one you just placed, pick it up and position it there. It really is that easy.

That's not to say it's too simple. There's plenty of depth here you can dive into if you need or want to, but it's clear from the first moment that this is editing software meant to start easy and draw people in.

I really like it. It reminds me of a lost youth spent making music videos to share on forums of like-minded people. It even has some of the awful transitions we love.

The only way it could be more for me would be if it had a Linkin Park catalog tucked away somewhere in there. Alas, it does not.

But this is far from the Movie Maker of 20 years ago. Instead, this is very much an AI-first product, and that's evident from moment one.

A lot of AI shenanigans are crammed in here. There's the traditional prompt-to-video route, but you can also generate a video from one of your Google Docs files, create an AI avatar as a host, or make direct edits with Omni.

There's a lot here. But I wanted to try one thing out: direct AI video generation. I wanted to know if it had improved enough to warrant its own editing software.

And the answer is no. But it is hilarious.

It has all the usual problems with AI videos

But one feature shows there's hope

It would be churlish to pretend AI videos aren't better than they used to be.

AI-generated videos have advanced from barely viewable mishmashes of visual artifacts and horrors from beyond the known universe, to just-about-obvious facsimiles of real life.

We've all received AI-generated videos from family members who didn't realize what they were viewing was fake — and probably didn't much care when you told them.

The implications for many areas of life are horrific. But is it really poised to eradicate the real Hollywood?

No. Quite far from it.

I took it for a spin. I gave it a rough script I'd come up with. I wanted to make something dumb, but that also fit the focus of this website. An Apple Store employee discovering an Android phone and repenting their sins sounded perfect.

It's dumb, not to be taken seriously, and I had a blast making it.

But boy oh boy, is that video a mess.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely hilarious. But most of the humor doesn't come from my poorly written script. No, it's from the AI generation.

All I did was give it an outline. The framing and everything else with it? That's all the AI. I didn't tell it to do an extra close-up of the guy's ears, or have the car fly off backward for some bizarre reason. Nor did I choose that swish leather jacket he's wearing in the last scene. But it's all hilarious.

But you can see the problems. The spoken lines that weirdly stutter, the lack of consistency between shots, the complete lack of understanding of how a 3D space works: these are all problems AI videos have, and they continue here.

One feature helps ease some of these issues, though. The Extend feature allows you to select an existing generated video and generate another clip to staple onto the end of it.

Using this feature means the AI has a decent idea of what it's already done and the material it's using. There's none of that pesky re-casting between scenes, because it can see the main actor it's already used.

I did say it "eased" this situation, rather than solved it. Because it doesn't.

Even if it knows what it's done before, it can't stay consistent. It still teleports people around the scene, and one actor morphs into another at random moments.

It's a mess. Plus, it can only extend for up to 20 seconds. If you want more footage than that, you're out of luck.

I could have cleaned this up if I'd wanted to. I could have used more of the editing software and gotten the AI to make tweaks. But when a 10-second generation takes as long as it does, my patience is limited.

Besides, why would I want to change Samsung Man's backward-flying car? I don't; it's hilarious.

And that's the software's biggest strength and its biggest weakness.

It's still just a fun distraction

Hollywood shouldn't worry

I really enjoyed using this software. It makes it so easy to make the dumbest videos you've ever seen, and I love it for that. But I don't know how it's going to move past that.

One of the biggest problems AI has is that it's fundamentally not a serious product. It's not good enough to replace human workers for most tasks because it lacks consistency and reliability.

But like most humans with those problems, man is it funny.

The question is whether it can get better from here, and I'm not sure if it can. To advance, it needs to understand what it's making and why it's important — and these aren't concepts mathematical equations can grasp.

If it can't move past that, Hollywood's job is safe. Because as fun as Google Vids is, it's little more than a fun distraction.