Getting rid of them isn’t straightforward—or cheap. Users have been forced to resort to regenerating clips (which costs them more money), using external subtitle-removing tools, or cropping their videos to get rid of the subtitles altogether.
Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, posted on X on June 9 that Google had developed fixes to reduce the gibberish text. But over a month later, users are still logging issues with it in Google Labs’ Discord channel, demonstrating how difficult it can be to correct issues in major AI models.
Like its predecessors, Veo 3 is available to paying members of Google’s subscription tiers, which start at $249.99 a month. To generate an eight-second clip, users enter a text prompt describing the scene they’d like to create into Google’s AI filmmaking tool Flow, Gemini, or other Google platforms. Each Veo 3 generation costs a minimum of 20 AI credits, and the account can be topped up at a cost of $25 per 2,500 credits.
Mona Weiss, an advertising creative director, says that regenerating her scenes in a bid to get rid of the random captions is becoming expensive. “If you’re creating a scene with dialogue, up to 40% of its output has gibberish subtitles that make it unusable,” she says. “You’re burning through money trying to get a scene you like, but then you can’t even use it.”
When Weiss reported the problem to Google Labs through its Discord channel in the hopes of getting a refund for her wasted credits, its team pointed her to the company’s official support team. They offered her a refund for the cost of Veo 3, but not for the credits. Weiss declined, as accepting would have meant losing access to the model altogether. The Google Labs’ Discord support team has been telling users that subtitles can be triggered by speech, saying that they’re aware of the problem and are working to fix it.