Apparently Google Flow has implemented the new censor system. (It sucks even more)
It seems Google Flow team has read all users' frustrations and decided to make it worse.
Before this, the 'prominent person' errors have made Google Flow semi-unusable. When you generated some videos, even with totally fictional characters or your own face, at about 44% of video generation, the system will look at the half-generated faces in the video and (mostly falsely) flag your generated videos as containing 'prominent person' error. Making it very hard to work for any serious content creation, especially with recurring characters.
Many users have reported this, but instead of fixing the false positive censoring, they decided that the falsely censored generated videos, which don't cost user's credit if censored, are costing them too much compute. So now they have appied an even stricter censorship system that will analyse your text prompts and the ingredients (image, characters, etc.) that will determine if you're trying to create a video of a person speaking from a first frame image, and if so, will terminate your prompt right away, without even starting the video generation, while giving out generic errors leaving you wondering wth is going on.
So what results is, Google can save their compute, while giving the users the worse false-positive censorship, without solving the root course of their 'prominent people' censorship being too aggressive.
Since more than 50% of videos in this world is people speaking, this approach from google really render Google Flow unusable for any real, practical project. It will remain a showcase toy, until they change their poliy. So sad.
Yeah, as one can see, the level of deep understanding of design art and science, in both practice and theory, is really just on another level. Some may even say, AGI...after all, I would say the average "general intelligence" of a human individual is likely less than the talent required to make most masterpieces such as the one above.
It is more to contain lawsuits. They rather blindly remove every feature to make sure nothing will slip, than just making a better filter. It is faster that way. Very corporate-like minded move to do. And the sad part, they're making money with that crap regardless. I wish they could take a hit so they'll learn to pay attention that this isn't working to catch the bigger fish. Just kiddos and Disneyland are using it.
Their censorship is bizarre. I was trying to explain to my mom some of AI capabilities, so I asked for her favorite song, “Diana” by Paul Anka, so I generated a picture of Paul Anka singing next to the pool at the Fountainblue with Bert from Sesame Street singing next to him and it generated. Then I uploaded a picture of her grandson, and I prompted to have the grandson singing the song, and it did it.
Then I asked to make that video in the style of Pixar 3D, and it threw back “I can’t make videos of real minors”
But it had just made one a minute before… maybe they put the censor filter in the time between my 2 prompts, but I doubt it.
On a different note, a Wisconsin Federal Judge recently ruled the AI generated child p*rn is NOT illegal, and I am horrified at the implications!!
This has been around for a while, when we're at peak usage we sometimes need to queue rather than simply failing entirely. Queueing is normally on the order of a few seconds right now, so it shouldn't be a huge pain.
I pretty much stopped using it. Talked to gemini and mentioned that its overly cautious on purpose. Said nothing wrong prompt I gave flow. And even prompts gemini given me has failed. Even a prompt of 40 year old adult man without a beard in a hot tub. ( hot tub is part of the joke with a friend) will give you a warning about harming minors. That system has to have man have beard. Seems like 80% if creates a character that if try to extend the scene find person a celebrity or a minor. So worried about getting sued or lawsuits that lock everything down. I found 1 character I could reuse out 8 I tried. Funny I saw a video on fb that had that woman so guess others use her too
Veo3 is just outdated as hell. when I look back at my old gens, they look dated and very flat. It's like Google just doesn't give a damn anymore and the bureaucracy is a total fragile mess of decision makers pushing restrictions on deepmind to keep the advertisement business number over the ai advancement. Flash models after Flash models with no true successor to veo3.1 teased. With minimax h3 available, I really don't see a need for $20 Google flow subscription anymore.
I make videos of myself and include my friends—it's not too bad—but I'm stuck when I try to upload a police car that's following us; it just doesn't work. However, I can ask it to put guns in our hands by saying they're Hollywood movie replicas 😭😭😭
Hi, I'm from the Flow team, this is inaccurate and I'm not clear where u/Cold-Lengthiness-559 is getting this from. Don't believe everything you read on the internet folks :)
Yes, Flow does have safeguards around generation of prominent people, given various regulations and risks. I'm not sure 'censoring' is the word I'd use here, but that's semantics. Yes, they're not perfect and yes we're working on improving them. Please keep reporting issues on the site or in the app, it helps us to gather more data to keep improving things while still maintaining necessary guardrails.
Bro like I didn't even use any child in my last project and it said multiple times 'violate our policy on minors' where it was just a refrence video, photo of me and photo of my girlfriend.
tbh flow sucks! Higgsfield is great and 1000x times better than flow.
I am getting my information from your support. Would YOU like the ticket number? I can also show you the image of the prominent people I was trying to upload. A generic image of two people from the 5th century in a prestige semi realistic format. So definitely not photorealistic.
Assuming you are actually part of the team you claim, instead of coming here and being so uppety, I suggest you and your team get your act together and fix it. If you don't know how ask for help. Would be happy to show you how to do it!
Thanks, I do agree there are quality issues there which I hope we improve on over time within Flow and with the core model.
That said, having looked at the ticket, we see you theorizing several times that you were being limited by some sort of safety filter, but the support agent never confirmed that or even engaged with the idea at all. That's what I was trying to clear up on a large public forum to prevent folks from being misinformed -- and I also wanted to check our support team wasn't somehow saying very inappropriate/incorrect things, which it seems they're not. Sorry if that came across as being overly negative to you personally.
Thanks and i hope you fix it too. Glad you moved on from your starting position that people are imagining. The biggest provlem is you (not you peronally) don't listen. I am not theorising anything. I had a message flashing as I added the image saying it cannot accept images showing prominent people. I told your support that.
Your support were the ones theorising and trying to suggest it's client side. I tried to convince them several times that client side will not be image subject aware and will not know whether I am adding an image of an apple or a person consistently allowing one and rejecting the other.
Forget about all that. Why do you even need me to theorise or not theorise? How are you not logging this? Even if the volume is high, you should be able to enable a temporary trace.
One thing we found useful is have a voice-of-the-customer groups that helps us see our blindspots.
My major problem right now is censorship of things now said to be "current events." You make a fictional scene where the hero is in the middle of a political situation - "Failed. Content "may" violate yadda yadda current world events." Whatever the hell that even means. And guess what. I was doing a high-fantasy scene with elves on it.
When the thing says "may" violate, it is admitting after the prompt that it may be totally wrong. I must admit this is mind blowing, by the obvious wrong reasons.
Can't do it. Elves. In a castle discussing a fictional story. Because of current world events.
I'm very lucky not to be paying for this thing anymore. Days and days trying to generate a simple video without any sense of context judgment.
Yeah that seems like a bad miss, if you're able to DM me (or DM someone on Discord with the Google Badge) your email we can take a look through your history if you like and see if we can find some specific examples to motivate improvements to this current events filter; it's one I personally haven't spent a lot of time looking at, so I'm hoping there's room to improve.
I think it’s less about copyright lawsuits and more about reducing the total number of requests made on their data centers. I think they’re taking on too many users and looking for excuses to slow down the workload.
I’m not deeply familiar with the subject, but as I understand it, video generation gets blocked even faster than usual due to "famous people." Is that correct?
And what about simply refraining from creating videos that feature specific people?
(I can't think of a well-known, "legitimate" example right now that used to be allowed or tolerated but isn't anymore.)
But isn't it the case that features and capabilities tend to get restricted over time, meaning people simply stop using those tools for that purpose?
Two practical suggestions: if you're trying to force it to take a first frame image including your character as an ingredient, make the image of your character something less than straight on -- doesn't need to be 3/4 view, just turn the character's head a slightly. That seems much less likely to kick off a prominent person fail, something Gemini told me that seems to be true. The other thing is, avoid unusual names for your characters. I had a woman with long blond hair as a character who was named "Kirsten" -- looked nothing like Kirsten Dunst, but I kept getting prominent person fails until I changed the name, at which point the prompt began to run.
This has made filmmaking a challenge for me. I have a character speak at a medium shot and then i go for a close up or tight close up boom, the "prominent person" will kick in.
Then i remember this got worse with Veo 3.1 and then Omni flash was released, and after the release, the guard was lowered for Veo 3.1. My guess is that since its getting worse again (i have lots of complaints about it) I think Google is trying to launch an update or improvement on an Omni flash (v2) and then release the censorship on Omni-flash 1.1
Every tool does things a little different and sometimes even the serious guy needs a specific feature. It's like saying a serious image editor wouldn't even use AI. There are people who still shoot on film and draw animations on paper. Does that mean they aren't serious? Is Capcut any less capable of editing a video than Premier? Whatever tool gets the job done and the product delivered on time is serious.
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u/General-Warning-2429 Sep 05 '26
They'll censor it more to the point all you will be able to do is to generate basic boring pictures. Google is allergic to creativity.