Just when I thought I’d hit my monthly limit for AI-generated nonsense, Google decided to up the ante. With Veo 3, video made by artificial intelligence has now ascended to an entirely new and baffling tier. We’ve already seen the slop seep into every corner—YouTube, video games, VR, apps—you name it. Until now, that flood of weird, messy, sometimes amusing content felt relatively low-stakes. But it’s becoming clear that all of it has been building toward something bigger—and that “something” looks suspiciously like a bid for the mainstream spotlight.
On Thursday night, Veo 3 stepped into the spotlight as the engine behind a fully AI-generated commercial for the financial services company Kalshi, which aired during the NBA Finals. While this isn’t the first AI ad to hit the airwaves—AI spots were already making waves during this year’s Super Bowl—it marks a notable leap for Veo 3, which Google only unveiled last month at its I/O conference. And while AI-generated advertising isn’t exactly new, this particular moment managed to push both the technical limits and the aesthetic lows of video generation at the same time.
The ad’s creation process, shared by its so-called creator (or maybe more accurately, prompter) PJ Ace, was drenched in Google AI from start to finish. “Kalshi asked me to make a spot about people betting on markets, including the NBA Finals,” Ace posted on X. “I said the best Veo 3 content is crazy people doing crazy things while showcasing your brand.” The concept—reportedly a thematic mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Florida Man absurdity—was fleshed out with help from both Gemini and ChatGPT. Ace then had Gemini generate the prompt text that would eventually be fed into Veo 3. Yes, you read that right: AI wrote the prompt for another AI. And that’s how a national TV ad came to be.
The final product looks a lot like what others have managed to squeeze out of Veo 3. The visuals are fairly realistic at a glance, but if you look closely, each scene is brief and disconnected—because continuity is still a major stumbling block. Even Google’s own polished demos last month, including that chaotic action clip featuring a SWAT team firing at invisible enemies and whiplash-inducing camera cuts, couldn’t escape this issue. Veo 3 can generate convincing snapshots, but threading them into anything resembling a coherent sequence? That’s still a mess.
Google’s other tool, Flow, is supposed to address this—letting users describe scenes, characters, and camera angles across time—but even that has trouble sticking the landing. As for the Kalshi ad, Ace says it took him two days and around 300 to 400 generations to complete, which underscores that this isn’t “just push a button” tech—at least not yet. But the implications are hard to ignore. According to Ace, the ad cost about 95% less than a traditional production would’ve. That’s a massive reduction—and a giant red flag for anyone whose job depends on that traditional production pipeline.
So no, Veo 3 isn’t the future of advertising just yet. But if slashing costs is the goal—and it usually is—then you can bet this AI-generated slop is only going to become more common.
