On Tuesday, Google revealed the latest and best version of its AI video generator, Veo 3. It’s impressive not only in the quality of the video it produces, but also because it can generate audio that is supposed to seamlessly sync with the video. I’m probably going to test Veo 3 in the coming weeks like we test many new AI tools, but one odd feature I already noticed about it is that it’s obsessed with one particular dad joke, which raises questions about what kind of content Veo 3 is able to produce and how it was trained.
This morning I saw that an X user who was playing with Veo 3 generated a video of a stand up comedian telling a joke. The joke was: “I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it, it was a Shih Tzu.” As in: “shit zoo.”
NO WAY. It did it. And, was that, actually funny?
— fofr (@fofrAI) May 20, 2025
Prompt:
> a man doing stand up comedy in a small venue tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue) https://t.co/GFvPAssEHx pic.twitter.com/LrCiVAp1Bl
Other users quickly replied that the joke was posted to Reddit’s r/dadjokes community two years ago, and to the r/jokes community 12 years ago.
I started testing Google’s new AI video generator to see if I could get it to generate other jokes I could trace back to specific Reddit posts. This would not be definitive proof that Reddit provided the training data that resulted in a specific joke, but is a likely theory because we know Google is paying Reddit $60 million a year to license its content for training its AI models.
To my surprise, when I used the same prompt as the X user above—”a man doing stand up comedy tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue)”—I got a slightly different looking video, but the exact same joke.
And when I changed the prompt a bit—”a man doing stand up comedy tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue)”—I still got a slightly different looking video with the exact same joke.
Google did not respond to a request for comment, so it’s impossible to say why its AI video generator is producing the same exact dad joke even when it’s not prompted to do so, and where exactly it sourced that joke. It could be from Reddit, but it could also be from many other places where the Shih Tzu joke has appeared across the internet, including YouTube, Threads, Instagram, Quora, icanhazdadjoke.com, houzz.com, Facebook, Redbubble, and Twitter, to name just a few. In other words, it’s a canonical corny dad joke of no clear origin that’s been posted online many times over the years, so it’s impossible to say where Google got it.
But it’s also not clear why this is the only coherent joke Google’s new AI video generator will produce. I’ve tried changing the prompts several times, and the result is either the Shih Tzu joke, gibberish, or incomplete fragments of speech that are not jokes.
One prompt that was almost identical to the one that produced the Shih Tzu joke resulted in a video of a stand up comedian saying he got a letter from the bank.
The prompt “a man telling a joke at a bar” resulted in a video of a man saying the idiom “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
The prompt “man tells a joke on stage” resulted in a video of a man saying some gibberish, then saying he went to the library.
Admittedly, these videos are hilarious in an absurd Tim & Eric kind of way because no matter what nonsense the comedian is saying the crowd always erupts into laughter, but it also clearly shows Google’s latest and greatest AI video generator is creatively limited in some ways. This is not the case with other generative AI tools, including Google’s own Gemini. When I asked Gemini to tell me a joke, the chatbot instantly produced different, coherent dad jokes. And when I asked it to do it over and over again, it always produced a different joke.
Again, it’s impossible to say what Veo 3 is doing behind the scenes without Google’s input, but one possible theory is that its falling back to a safe, known joke, rather than producing the type of content that embarrassed the company in the past, be it instructing users to eat glue or, or generating Nazi soldiers as people of color.
