SOTA Generative Media Panel — Dumitru Erhan, Shane Gu & Nicole Brichtova, Google DeepMind

Preferring an AI-generated video does not show that it is more realistic. The publisher's description of this panel, featuring Google DeepMind researchers, recounts a test in which the team took captions from real videos, regenerated the same scenes with its own model, and found that people largely preferred the generated version.

According to the description, Dumitru Erhan explained that the output was not more realistic but sharper, more saturated, and had nicer skin tones, and that human preference is an unreliable thing to optimize against. That illustrates a problem for evaluation: asking which clip people like best can reward a particular aesthetic without establishing fidelity to the original scene. A preference score needs to be interpreted according to the question viewers actually answered.