Racist Videos Generated by Google’s Veo 3 Flood TikTok, Amassing Millions of Views
Videos containing racist content generated using Google’s Veo 3 video creation tool have been discovered on the popular platform TikTok, according to a report by the digital watchdog organization Media Matters. Despite both Google and TikTok publicly asserting their strict policies against such material, these videos have amassed millions of views.
A key piece of evidence linking the videos to Veo 3 is the distinctive “Veo” watermark present in the footage. Additionally, several users explicitly referenced Veo 3 or artificial intelligence in their hashtags or video descriptions. All of the identified clips also adhered to Veo 3’s duration constraints, either lasting no more than eight seconds or composed of multiple short segments that each fall within this limit.
Veo 3, launched by Google in May of this year, allows users to generate brief video and audio content from text prompts. According to Google’s official website, the tool is designed to block “harmful prompts and outputs.”
TikTok, for its part, reiterates in its community guidelines that “hate speech and abusive behavior are strictly prohibited,” and the platform pledges not to promote content that perpetuates negative stereotypes about individuals or groups with protected characteristics. Nevertheless, such videos continue to appear and rapidly gain traction.
According to TikTok spokesperson Ariane de Cellier, the company acts swiftly to remove such content. She stated that the profiles mentioned in the Media Matters report had already been deleted, many of them even before the report’s publication.
It was also revealed that some of the same videos flagged by Media Matters had surfaced on YouTube, though they garnered significantly fewer views there. As of now, Google has not issued an official comment on the matter.
