I swear that’s not a video of me at Disneyland. Or is it?
“I’ve finally made it to Disneyland,” I say in the video, looking around at the magical scene with a chuckle. “This place is pure magic.”
Well no, it isn’t me. It’s my avatar, which I created this morning using the Gemini app. The process took about five minutes and it was as easy as enrolling my face in Face ID on my iPhone. You just go to Settings → Avatar in the Gemini app and follow the prompts, which involve aiming your phone’s camera at your face as you turn this way and that, then speaking a series of number (like “48” and “72”) out loud.
Once I created my avatar—a paid Google AI account is required to make your own—I simply started a new Gemini chat, tapped the “+” button, added my avatar from the menu, and submitted a prompt: “Make a video of me at Disneyland.” And here’s the result:
That looks and sounds an awful lot like me, although my daughter assured me that it looked like AI. I’m glad she can tell the difference.
Next I tried another prompt: “Make a video of me in a podcast studio talking about RTX Spark.” A few minutes later, there I was, spouting off about Nvidia’s brand-new system-on-a-chip from Computex:
I must say, avatar me is way better at podcasting than real me.
For my last video, I took things into more problematic territory: “Make a video of me admitting to a crime.” Gemini happily obliged:
OK, so what is this?
Google bills its new avatar tool—first unveiled at Google I/O last month—as a way to “streamline your content creation process.” The tool, which is now entering general availability, works with Gemini Omni, Google’s new multimodal model that can accept images and videos as inputs and has a far greater understanding of physics and the real world than did Veo, Google’s previous standalone video model.
You must be at least 18 years old to create an avatar, Google says. The selfie and voice data used to craft your avatar will be used for creating AI-generated videos as well as to “protect Google, our users, and the public.” Generated video using your avatar are also embedded with a Google SynthID watermark, identifying the content as AI-created.
You can delete your avatar at any time, according to Google, and if you do delete your avatar, Google promises to wipe the selfie and voice data that was used to initially create it.
Google has strict guidelines and restrictions against generating deepfake content, and Gemini’s new “personal avatar” tool is meant strictly for creating your own avatar, not one of somebody else. There are also limits on how many Gemini Omni videos you can create per day. As a Google AI Pro user, I was cut off after just three videos. (Maybe that’s a blessing, given Omni’s potential as an AI slop machine.)
In any event, my Gemini avatar has thoroughly creeped me out, and I can’t see any use for it except (at best) as a goofy “look at what AI can do!” kind of thing. From a wider perspective? Well… ugh.