3 creative tips from our Flow Sessions artists

Source: Google Date: 2026-04-23 URL: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/flow-sessions-artists-lessons/

Summary

Google Labs completed its third cohort of Flow Sessions, a six-week program pairing artists from journalism, advertising, and fashion with Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool. This cohort was the first to recruit outside traditional filmmaking disciplines. The published takeaways center on using AI as creative extension — embracing experimentation as discovery, embedding personal narrative into AI-generated work, and using video as a cross-disciplinary medium.

Implications

Flow Sessions is a soft distribution channel for Google’s generative video stack — each cohort produces content that normalizes AI-assisted filmmaking and implicitly competes with Sora (OpenAI), Runway, and Kling for creative community adoption. The deliberate expansion into non-filmmaking disciplines (journalism, fashion) is Google testing whether Flow’s use case generalizes before pushing it to broader markets.

The “no traditional filmmakers” framing is the tell: Google is making a bet that the creative AI tools market is less about professional video production and more about cross-disciplinary creators who currently have no visual production capability. That’s a different user segment than what Runway or Sora primarily serve, and a plausible flanking move.

Watch:

• Flow general availability timeline — it’s still Google Labs territory
• Whether journalist and fashion creator outputs from this cohort surface in mainstream media
• How this positions against OpenAI’s Sora creator program, which targets similar demographics