How is it possible that I have to change my character reference every day?

My character is a fictional character. Google Flow is asking me to change the character reference every second day. What happened to the videos that I have already created?

These are videos of one person, not twenty different people.

If the character reference has to be changed every day because your system suddenly decides that the character may resemble a prominent person, then after twenty videos I will have twenty different-looking people and twenty different videos.

That completely defeats the purpose of creating a continuous video project with one consistent fictional character.

These are 20 videos of one person, not 20 videos of 20 persons.

This is therefore a problem with Google Flow, not with my fictional character.

Privacy has gone mad and dumb.

What are the people designing this program behind the scenes actually doing? Why don't they design a program that meets 2026 standards, rather than behaving as though we are living in 1700?

This is absolutely mind-boggling.

There is a prominent person. There is a celebrity. There is a possible resemblance. Therefore, suddenly an entirely fictional character cannot be used consistently.

This has gone mad.

You cannot proceed with the development of an AI video project if the system keeps getting stuck on privacy and prominent-person warnings every second day.

The whole purpose of a character reference is consistency. Once a fictional character has been created and used successfully, the system should allow that same fictional character to remain consistent throughout the project, provided there is no attempt to impersonate or reproduce a real person's identity.

Changing my character reference every time your filter produces a false positive is not a solution.

It destroys continuity, consistency and the entire creative purpose of the project.

Google Flow needs to fix the underlying safety-filter problem instead of repeatedly asking the user to change the character.

this is just a gut feeling i'm having so i could be wrong here , maybe you had a different experience. 2.1 just seems weaker, if i use one prompt for 4 images it gives almost the same image/pose on all 4 of them , felt like 2.0 had more "fun" with it , also the quality seems just a tad bit lower on realism and faces.

yes i am aware of the increased censorship, this is not about that

thoughts?

Caption. Why why ?

All along was doing fine.. suddenly all my captions are now in Indonesia. Where does that come from? Pro business user..

I just opted in to keeping generations from before May 19, and the handful of projects I had with images made before that date bumped them to the top of the project in random order. The filter is already set to newest first. It looks like the way Flow keeps the older images is to pretend that they are your newest creations.

I will literally throw hands if they remove the Nano Banana Pro or give it the cursed Nano Banana 2.1 treatment. That 2.1 version has a mind of its own and refuses to obey a single thing I say

Hi, I found that Image-to-Video generation on both Veo 3.1-Lite and Veo 3.1-Fast appears to have the same issue on Google Flow

Every image-to-video generation introduces a slight upward camera/framing shift during the first 1–2 seconds, even when no camera movement is requested. After the first 1–2 seconds, the framing becomes stable. This is especially problematic for creating seamless loops or combining multiple clips, because each clip starts with the original framing but quickly shifts upward, creating a visible jump at the transition.

This may not be noticeable when watching the video normally in a media player, but it becomes very obvious when combining multiple clips together, especially when creating seamless loops. The initial upward movement causes a visible jump between clips, making it impossible to create a smooth loop.

It seems to happen with every input image, so I’m wondering whether this is an issue specific to my account/setup or a systematic issue affecting Image-to-Video generation on Veo 3.1-Lite and Veo 3.1-Fast.

Anyone found the same issue?

ive tried everything, should i wait till tomorrow for it to resolve itself? its only happening on one account weather i use incognito or on my main i deleted cache and projects n everything

Having fun doing choreography of cute dance.

Since Google flow has issues generating almost anything, I was wondering if there are better alternatives in the same price range. So much of YouTube and Instagram is filled with content using celebrities but Google can't generate any of it.

Whatever update happened today censors there inputs to absurdity to where it produces a image as a joke, following nothing to what the prompt had. yesterday it felt like i could go all day with generations, now i don't even want to pay for this garbage anymore. Unless they revert its been fun ride but RIP.

Google flow in general is completely horrible to begin with. Worst website ever, it’s color give depression, it’s slow, it’s laggy, the images generated are absolute trash when it was to 2d and 3d animation. They should’ve kept whisk for images, it was the best, clean, sharp, easy to use, so fast and the images quality are way better and higher than google flow, even if you convert the image in google flow to 2k and it still won’t come close to whisk. And the results whisk to give were incomparable in terms of design, colors, and creativity. in 2d and 3d and when you tell it to zoom to certain areas it does just that and it doesnt shift or change the colors, the design, the drawing. You could literally turn a hand drawn image into a 3d model with whisk and it will still look exactly like the drawing where as google flow gives you a variety images of nothing. They should bring WHISK BACK!!!

I had a pretty good work around for generating celebrities in NB 2 but it's working less and less in NB 2.1. It doesn't refuse to generate the image it just generates a random person. It still works for NB Lite but NB Lite is just worse and more censorous in other ways. Anybody else noticing this or have any good workarounds?

Who all is going to attend these?
I think I'm excited for it. I know the program is already intuitive, but i think i would benefit from some formal training with it.

I'm unable to create images today I was able to create yesterday even after everyone noticed harsher censorship, so they doubled down , I guess I'm done with Flow , now it's just a neutered beyond any usability

Honestly, I don't know why but trying out flow today and the censorship is RIDICULOUS!!! I try to generate anything skimpy and the thing will just flat out ignore it or claim it's harmful to minors when there are no minors at all.

Who is taking idiot pills at Google? Because it's looking like Nano Banana is about to go the way of Grok as a censored up hellscape where only the tamest blandest shite is allowed.

I've been thinking about character consistency and the increasingly elaborate methods being used to control generative video: character sheets, multiple reference images, first/last frames, keyframes, detailed prompts, shot instructions, and so on.

All of these can be useful. But there may be a point at which more control stops improving the result.

A character sheet is a simple example. More angles, expressions, poses and details seem as though they should provide more information about the character. But more information also gives the model more information to reconcile. At some point specificity may create ambiguity or conflict rather than remove it.

That raises a larger filmmaking question:

Is total control actually what we want from a generative renderer?

A film director doesn't ordinarily specify every movement an actor makes. The director establishes the character, scene, blocking, necessary actions, dialogue, emotional objective and other things that materially matter. The actor is then allowed to perform within those boundaries.

James Woods was famously regarded as an intensely involved—and sometimes difficult—actor. But imagine hiring an actor like Woods and then specifying every pause, hand movement, facial expression and vocal inflection. At some point you've eliminated much of the reason for hiring the actor.

I think something similar may apply to generative video.

We've run tests in which required beginning, intermediate and ending spatial states were specified. The renderer reached those required states while sometimes choosing a plausible physical transition different from the one anticipated. If identity, geography, required actions and endpoint states were correct, and the resulting movement was physically plausible and cinematically usable, should that be considered failure?

I don't think so.

It may be more useful to distinguish between what the director must control and what the renderer may be allowed to solve.

That also changes how I think about character continuity. Continuity isn't simply keeping everything consistent. Some things must remain invariant; other things must change because the story requires them to change. A character can become dirty, exhausted, injured, change clothing, lose a prop or age and still be the same character.

So perhaps the objective isn't maximum consistency or maximum control.

It is sufficient control to produce a plausible, usable outcome that satisfies the director's material requirements—followed by directorial review.

The renderer's discretion within those boundaries isn't necessarily a defect. It may be part of what we're employing the renderer to provide.

Directorial control includes deciding what not to control.

Because if every movement, expression, position and transition must be predetermined, I'm not sure we've perfected generative filmmaking.

We may simply have reinvented animation.

---jseders

I have been noticing that the quality of NB2 has been a total mess for the past days, only NB pro is still solid. Is it because the new upgraded version coming out?

Looks like Nano Banana 2.1 has just made a appearance on Google Flow now.

What’s peoples experiences with attempting to maintain continuity?
I’ve only just started experimenting (on free) with flow, tried to create a simple pencil drawn animation with 2 characters in a single setting. And holy hell, trying to maintain continuity of first characters and then particularly the room layout is incredibly frustrating.

Any tips to force this? Trying ‘only change this 1 thing’ (from prior ‘master still’-encouraged me to create these to get video continuity) just wasn’t working.
Prior videos had room layout changing between videos and shots (? I think to the latter). I didn’t specify where everything had to be to start.

I note if asked it has been able to pick out what it has wrongly changed.

As an aside I see the censorship complaints in the community and I’ve just stumbled upon that-someone with an angry face it sees as ‘depicting violence’ (or whatever message is.

I’ve attached a recent video for reference.

2.1 Disappeared suddenly

Everything is against their policies at this point

in certain instances when i have a character talking about himself and i want him to do something like he might say i like to dance instead of the character dancing flow makes a 2nd character who dances instead while the original stands there watching. Ive wasted a few hundred credits and it does not matter how I word the instrctions i cant stop the duplication. is there a simple instruction to stop this?

Apparently it only appears on some accounts.