187: Good grief — another wave of AI announcements
Google I/O leads a flurry of updates and products directly effecting the creative world
Pity the tech reporters. I’m kidding—they live for times like this. We are once again inundated with new capabilities, tools, process, and opportunity. As a creative person, I’m thrilled yet overwhelmed. So many new toys and no time to invest serious play in any one specifically without massive FOMO.
I’m going to bookend this post with quotes sourced from the ever insightful
, starting with his recommendation to evaluate AI opportunities through the Desirability, Viability, Feasibility (DVF) framework.“(DVF) provides a structured way to move beyond the hype and looks at the opportunities from multiple angles, not just the efficiences or benefits that AI can bring to the business. It can be an excellent way to develop a common understanding of value, supporting better cross-functional working, less competing agendas, and greater agility. It stops AI being a solution in search of a problem.”
Amen. Now on with this week’s tsunami.
Google I/O 2025 (May 20-21)
“Google is betting that distribution plus incremental agentic glue will outweigh raw model horsepower,” write
Jones in his handy I/O recap. In other words—how you actually use Google’s AI matters more than any particular model’s prowess or strength.The company’s annual developer conference (full video here) was rooted exclusively in AI and boasted 100 announcements (lots of useful links there). When I think about creativity and idea people, I’m curious about the following:
Flow
We saw iterations of this platform idea starting about a year ago across numerous providers—imagine a singular environment where prompting creates not just video clips, but narrative sequences of clips with consistent characters. That’s essentially Flow (announced here), which integrates Veo2, Imagen and Gemini for a storyboarding and video creation process. Flow requires a Gemini Pro account at $20/month.
Flow TV is a handy resource for seeing how others are prompting.
Veo3
Is the latest video generator, also integrated into Flow, with new capabilities including native audio generation (i.e. background sound effects, dialogue, etc.) created in synch with the motion visuals. For example…
The end result might not be tremendous, yet, but the fact one model can now generate motion and synched audio is impressive. Perhaps more applicable, imagine you’re under the gun to produce some cooking b-roll for your brand. Does this work?
Google’s image and video creation tools are beginning to equal or exceed competitors, and have the added advantage of simple integration into Slides and Docs. Why bother with stock searches when you can create something specific now?
Project Astra
While still in beta, I’m very curious about the ways in which Project Astra has evolved its abilities to recognize, evaluate and discuss what a device camera sees in real time. The implications for those with vision loss are amazing.
Or real time tutoring.
I’m building out an AI for Artists curriculum at MCAD this fall. You bet I’m going to find ways to integrate AI tutoring into the experience.
Now put this concept—the camera can explain the world you see—into practice for brands. How might retailers, concert venues, local governments, airlines, or tourism provoke audiences to utilize tools like Astra to empower and enhance what they’re doing?
(Near) Real Time Translation inside Meet
The world is getting smaller. Starting with English and Spanish, Google is beginning to offer (more or less) real time audio translation inside Meet, “while preserving your voice, tone, and expression.”
I’m thinking how this transforms customer service, corporate training, and international collaboration. Soon enough, you and I will speak any language we need to, with our own unique inflections, automatically. How might this capability enhance and evolve global politics, culture and understanding?
And many of these capabilities are getting nestled inside Gemini, or Docs, or Slides automatically. Per the point above, Google is betting integration matters most.
🙋🏼♂️ By the way, college students are eligible to get Google’s AI suite and 2TB of storage for free.
Meanwhile, Meta’s launched a standalone app. While perhaps not as impressive as Google’s recent news, this one matters because of scale. The more AI becomes the lens through which you (and your loved ones) experience content, or each other, the more AI influences our perception and behavior. And there’s no owner’s manual. How might this turn out?
Adobe announced a pretty massive change in its subscription pricing, notes Ars Technica. In effect, current “all apps” users will be paying $10 more per month, “because AI.” The challenge, of course, is—is Adobe’s AI worth the upcharge?
Increasingly, those kinds of pricing moves are driving even more adoption of platforms like Canva, which announced a slew of AI enhancements at its recent annual conference. Their motivation is to reduce the friction previously imposed by knowledge. You used to have to learn design terminology to employ it. Yes, mediocrity is now free. But does it matter?
🤔 So let’s conclude with a salient quote about leveraging AI, from Sangeet Paul Choudary (sourced via
),“The more frictionless execution becomes, the more it loses value. Value shifts to discernment - knowing what to produce. But instead of adjusting to this shift, most people double down on output. They respond to new capability with more action, not better intention.”
As we’ve discussed a fair amount here, AI too easily multiplies mediocrity. The real AI skill isn’t scaling every mountain but knowing which mountain offers the most value.