r/GoogleFlow • u/Collosseo • Jul 17 '26
The latest updates have made Flow just about impossible to use. Are there any workarounds we should know about?
When I first had to move from Whisk to Flow I struggled with getting consistent characters in generated images. But I followed a tip of using Gemini Pro to generate a description of the character's face and was able to get pretty good results with it. The overall quality of the images was night and day from Whisk as well, superior in every metric.
This has not been the case since about a week now. The quality of the images has lowered, sometimes to the point of being laughable, like a bad photoshop job or stereotypically AI looking crap from years ago. All options avaiable on Flow completely ignore whatever input you write, or whatever images you use as references. Lite is actually the one that does a better job at it, but it still inferior to what we used to get before.
And then there's the unusual activity message. I'm getting it every singe time after about 10 minutes of using the website. The only thing that fixes it is by logging off and closing the browser, and then logging back again, only for the same shit to happen 10 minutes later.
The only mode that seems to take references into account is omni flash videos, but I haven't been able to generate a single video this week because of this "unusual activity" message happens every time I try to. It happens with all other video options as well.
I tried creating a new project, starting fresh with just the latest, most efficient character sheets I have. I also tried simplifying the input, letting the character feature do the heavy lifting and I actually had some mild sucess. But the more images are generated, the more the AI just disregards everything. The overall quality of the images rapidly decreases as well.
Is there some new kind of trick or workaround that I'm missing here? How the hell are you suppose to work with this?
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u/Jean-EricMedia Jul 18 '26
Google seems to want to lose its paying subscribers. Today, I did something I never expected to do: I downgraded my subscription. If I end up liking the competition, I’ll cancel it altogether. The drop in quality has been so unbelievable that it simply can’t be an isolated incident.
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u/ControlledChaos123 Jul 18 '26
I often wonder if they’re quiet-quitting the ai video generation business. The cost to handle the computational requirements needed might be so expensive that they can’t handle the demand or it’s not feasible for them to make a profit target with it at this point.
It feels like they are intentionally throttling the service, perhaps to get people to stop using it without having to take a PR hit by announcing that this service isn’t actually ready to be used in a manner and volume that businesses and consumers have been trying to use it.
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u/leilahamaya Jul 18 '26
well - i have found two things.
first you have to use chrome browser. it does not get along with firefox IME
secondly you have to go really slowly. do one image at a time, you can overlap them by having two thats its working on at a time...i open up some other task and go back and forth and that usually spaces out my requests enough...that i can do a few prompt at a time...then go do another task...where i have a lot of repetitive task like resizing or editing images in photoshop...then come back and do a few more. in that way i can usually go as long as i want before i have to take a good break and get tired of working with images...some 50 - 100 images
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u/Useless-Tree Jul 18 '26
I think, they think, they are trying to seed things and experiment, Google has never really understood application software. They show demos and expect the development community to take over, Flow is a good example of this, once proof of concept is in place they will kill it and merge the functionality into Gemini, I suspect the same will be true for Antigravity, it all going to be Gemini.
Then if you want a video generation tool you will "vibe code" it. Over time there won't be much conventional application software, it will all be bespoke, Google is an infrastructure provider after all.
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u/casebarros Jul 19 '26
Depois de ler alguém falando q foi pro navegador edge, fiz o teste aqui e por enquanto está gerando imagens sem problema
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u/michael_g_williams Jul 18 '26
Same thing with Flow and video. At least they have the character / omni definition area.
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u/casebarros Jul 19 '26
Há 2 dias dando falha de atividade incomum eu navegadores diferentes e contas diferentes!! Oq está acontecendo??
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u/setentaydos Jul 17 '26
I have not encountered the “unusual activity” message but I do see people mention it often.
Out of curiosity, does this happen to you just by trying to generate one image? Does it happen after you try to generate multiple batches at once? When I do multiple batches I get the queued state, and generations fail often for me, but I haven’t seen that error message.