It is warm. Like, actually warm, which is rare for Dolores Park. I stand there. A dinosaur is prehistoric and patient. I sing to it. A cupcake appears. Pink candle. Magic trick or glitch? When I blow out the wax, the CGI beast looks content. Smug, almost.
That man singing looks like me. Sounds like me, mostly. But it is not me.
This comes from Google Gemini. New avatar feature. It clones your voice and face, then drops that digital doppelganger into video. It leans on Omni, their new video model. You need the $20 Pro subscription for this.
I hit the cap. Fast. Usage resets every five hours. I asked questions, burned two clips, then got kicked out. “Wait,” said the bot. Rude.
Two clips. Dinosaur. Surfer under the Golden Gate Bridge. Impressive. Creepy. Cringe-worthy too. Jumbled logic. Outfits that make no sense. But the face… zoomed in, the teeth are slightly wrong. Chin fat, though? That’s there. Reece 2. OpenAI had Sora. They let people clone others, too. Google does not. Adults can only clone themselves. For now.
Five minutes is all it takes. Bright room. Phone camera. Read two-digit numbers out loud. Look right. Swivel left. Done. Be careful with your outfit. That denim jacket you love might become your AI prison.
Let’s look at the birthday video.
Prompt: Generate a video of me singing happy birthday to an old dinosaur at Dolores Park hill.
It starts with a pause. A millennial hesitation. The background is scary accurate. Not generic park. This is that park. Palm trees. Salesforce tower looming. Google maps the world, remember? They know the geometry of hills.
Then the singing. Better baritone than my own. Less shaky. Hands bounce like a mini-conductor. Then “to” comes. It stutters. Cut to wide angle. Chaos. Cupcake vanishes? Appears? I exhale smoke? To blow out a candle? Rude AI. It was my birthday, essentially.
The second clip. Surfer.
Prompt: Generate a video of me surfing under Golden Gate Bridge.
Denim suit. No shoes. Weird choice for water. The camera angle feels like a GoPro taped to the board. Realistic texture. Bad logic.
Women suffer more from this tech. Non-consensual deepfakes are a real nightmare. Google says safety comes first.
“We try to prevent harm,” Nicole Brichtova from DeepMind told me. “But we don’t block benign things.”
Balance? Maybe.
The stuttering is obvious. Errors pop up. Yet.
The feeling remains. These clips feel more real than my last voicemail. Or a video of me at a bar on Friday. The avatar isn’t a hotter, better version. No.
It is just me. But always ready. Anywhere. Always performing.
