Content warning: This article contains racist and antisemitic imagery, videos, and language.
These videos — seemingly created with Google’s Veo 3, a publicly accessible text-to-video generator — traffic in racist tropes, such as depicting Black people as monkeys and criminals and featuring imagery of Black people with watermelons and fried chicken.
Users are also posting misleading AI-generated videos of immigrants and protesters, including videos in which protesters are run over by cars. And in an especially dystopian nightmare, AI-generated videos are reenacting marginalized groups’ historical traumas, depicting concentration camps and Ku Klux Klan attacks on Black Americans.
Veo 3 — Google’s text-to-video generative AI model — was released on May 20. The publicly available AI generator currently has a limit of 8-second videos, and Google reportedly plans to integrate the video generator into YouTube Shorts.
The videos that Media Matters has identified on TikTok all ran a maximum of 8 seconds long (or were composed of multiple clips each lasting no more than 8 seconds). They also had a “Veo” label in the corner; used hashtags or captions, or had usernames, related to Veo 3 or AI; and/or had clear signs of AI generation (such as gibberish text, distortions, or continuity errors that defy the laws of physics).