Google admits the Gemini AI demo hands-on video was staged

Google’s Hands-on with Gemini video was one of the most impressive aspects of the firm’s new AI large language model (LLM) launch. However, Bloomberg has talked to a Google spokesperson who admitted that the video was not recorded in real-time.  Moreover, voice prompts were not even used, the vocal interaction with Gemini that you hear was dubbed in later. Google has also released a blog post, at the same time as the demo, which illustrates how the video was made. 

Sundar Pichai, the Google CEO, shared the hands-on video on Thursday, as he said the best way to understand “Gemini’s underlying amazing capabilities is to see them in action.” A hint that not all was as it seemed was included in the YouTube description of the video. “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity,” reads a footnote.

That footnote might be described as an understatement, or diversion from the truth, though. As the video wasn’t just shortened, there was no real interaction during the recording.  Google’s spokesperson told Bloomberg that the hands-on video was cobbled together with “using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text.” Thus, Gemini only responded to typed in prompts and still images that were uploaded to it. The conversational flow, with the human speaking, drawing, showing objects, playing with cups and other objects, was seemingly just staged for the demo video.

If we look back at the video, the spokesperson’s explanation smashes the natural conversational assistant impression we got during first exposure to the demo.

Some more explanation regarding the ‘Hands-on with Gemini’ video came from VP of Research & Deep Learning Lead, Google DeepMind, Oriol Vinyals, earlier today.  “The video illustrates what the multimodal user experiences built with Gemini could look like,” Vinyals reasoned. “We made it to inspire developers.” The Google DeepMind VP’s post drew a lot of fire for repeating the claim that the video was “real, shortened for brevity.”

Hopefully, Google’s video can inspire developers – at Google – to make Gemini function just like it does in the demo video. If not, people may feel a little deceived, or even cheated, by the gulf between the hands-on video demo and reality.