Google’s best Gemini demo was faked

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI” hit a million views over the last day, and it’s not hard to see why. The impressive demo “highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini,” showing how the multimodal model (that is, it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs.

To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise (“What the quack!”) when seeing a toy blue duck. It then responds to various voice queries about that toy, then the demo moves on to other show-off moves, like tracking a ball in a cup-switching game, recognizing shadow puppet gestures, reordering sketches of planets, and so on.