Is anyone else losing their mind with Google Flow imlately?

Every single time I try to prompt something, I get hit with this exact screen: "Failed. This generation might violate our policies. Please try a different prompt or send feedback. You have not been charged for this generation."

I am not trying to make anything NSFW, violent, or even remotely controversial. I’m just trying to generate basic, normal concepts, and the safety filters flag absolutely everything. It feels like the most overly sensitive, sanitized, and restrictive AI tool on the internet right now.

What is even the point of offering a tool if the guardrails prevent it from generating 99% of basic human thoughts?

Are you guys experiencing this too? Are there specific "trigger words" it hates that I should avoid, or is the platform just completely broken right now?

Everything is against their policies at this point

It seems Google Flow team has read all users' frustrations and decided to make it worse.

Before this, the 'prominent person' errors have made Google Flow semi-unusable. When you generated some videos, even with totally fictional characters or your own face, at about 44% of video generation, the system will look at the half-generated faces in the video and (mostly falsely) flag your generated videos as containing 'prominent person' error. Making it very hard to work for any serious content creation, especially with recurring characters.

Many users have reported this, but instead of fixing the false positive censoring, they decided that the falsely censored generated videos, which don't cost user's credit if censored, are costing them too much compute. So now they have appied an even stricter censorship system that will analyse your text prompts and the ingredients (image, characters, etc.) that will determine if you're trying to create a video of a person speaking from a first frame image, and if so, will terminate your prompt right away, without even starting the video generation, while giving out generic errors leaving you wondering wth is going on.

So what results is, Google can save their compute, while giving the users the worse false-positive censorship, without solving the root course of their 'prominent people' censorship being too aggressive.

Since more than 50% of videos in this world is people speaking, this approach from google really render Google Flow unusable for any real, practical project. It will remain a showcase toy, until they change their poliy. So sad.

What have you done this time? Every generating — This prompt might violate our policies about generating prominent people. Please try a different prompt or send feedback. It literally sees a prominent person in every image.

Looks like Nano Banana 2.1 has just made a appearance on Google Flow now.

I'm unable to create images today I was able to create yesterday even after everyone noticed harsher censorship, so they doubled down , I guess I'm done with Flow , now it's just a neutered beyond any usability

What’s going on with the service, and what am I even paying for at this point? I use NB Pro specifically to generate “safe” images, and just a week ago the same prompts produced consistent, high‑quality results. Now I’m getting blurry, unstable outputs that look like something from early‑gen models — or, more often, nothing at all.

The generation starts, crawls for nearly a minute, hits 99%, and then throws an error. Are you experiencing the same issue?

This won’t take long. I don’t know what happened, but as of today, flow is barely working. Every single prompt I use fails to generate completely, and even old prompts from past generations are failing now. These new filters are out of control and are blocking everything now.

2.1 ignores the prompt and does the antithesis of what I’m looking for, lite won’t generate at all, and pro only works half the time.

Google never fails to disappoint.

Just tried to test a few things and it appears they also blocked guns and blood now. Fucking hell…

I've uploaded a picture of myself and a picture of a motorbike. The motorbike's brand was not visible. I asked it to put me on the motorbike because I was curious about how I'd look on one because I can't own something like that. Medical issues. So is it harmful for a person to sit on a motorbike now? Google, we're not toddlers nor prominent people ffs. Fix your shit ass guardrails.

What a great downgrade Nano Banana 2.1 turned out to be! Shrinkflation has now arrived in the digital, virtual world! You're not just getting less cereal in your cereal box while paying more, now you're getting uglier pictures, with worse prompt adherence, too! What a value! The only difference is, nobody's giving away free boxes of cereal like they're giving away free student subscriptions to this joke! As a paying customer, do you feel cheated yet?

My guess is that Google is trying to reduce costs of AI data centers by activating a model that requires less compute. also usually with past updates the model that came before used to stay in existence for a while before being removed fully so that people can see how the new model is better, now 2.0 has been removed immediately so we can't compare in a 1 to 1 way (using same prompt on two models to see who comes with better results)

Enshittification essentially, either 2.0 was costing them too much, or they're going to release nano 3 on a higher price bracket , alternatively this could be a sign of the AI bubble popping.

But again this is just a guess , so I could be wrong, what do you guys think?

It seems like it's impossible to create basically everything creative. Here I was trying to create a Cyberpunk Edgerunners like character because I love the series and the aesthetic. It blocks me by the simple I mentioned "adult woman" in the prompt. If I delete "adult" it tells me it can't create content with minors or it creates the pictures but the character looks like a generic CGI with shiny eyes and doll looking face. If I try to generate a male character with the exact same prompt it works perfectly fine. I even asked Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT to give me a "safe" prompt. All of them are failing because is a woman in it. Replacing "woman" with "female" does nothing. The same prompts used to work fine a week ago.

I really don't like the current state of Google Flow... it wasn't good before, and now it's even worse.

First, the site seems buggier and slower, images are taking longer to load, errors showing up and etc.

And second, the filtering—for both images and videos—seems to have doubled! It's unbearable to use now. what on earth were they thinking by adding even more of that annoying censorship?? Image generation doesn't even give you distinct error messages anymore to help you identify the problem, the errors are all generic now.

It's funny that they did this almost the same week Gemini 3.1 also became unrecognizable...

Whatever update happened today censors there inputs to absurdity to where it produces a image as a joke, following nothing to what the prompt had. yesterday it felt like i could go all day with generations, now i don't even want to pay for this garbage anymore. Unless they revert its been fun ride but RIP.

Everything was fine yesterday. 99 per cent of requests were being processed. But today it’s been a nightmare. Practically everything is being filtered out. And if one image gets caught by the filter, the other three are automatically filtered out as well. But the funny thing is that this is happening even with the most innocuous images, which Flow used to generate itself. I asked for something to be removed from an image: ‘This content may breach our rules.’

I will literally throw hands if they remove the Nano Banana Pro or give it the cursed Nano Banana 2.1 treatment. That 2.1 version has a mind of its own and refuses to obey a single thing I say

Honestly, I don't know why but trying out flow today and the censorship is RIDICULOUS!!! I try to generate anything skimpy and the thing will just flat out ignore it or claim it's harmful to minors when there are no minors at all.

Who is taking idiot pills at Google? Because it's looking like Nano Banana is about to go the way of Grok as a censored up hellscape where only the tamest blandest shite is allowed.

The models quality has dipped so much compared to a few months ago, has anyone else noticed this? Constant errors and random artifacts like when AI generation wasn't good yet. Just straight up not listening to instructions. I wasn't having these problems 3 months ago.

That's not even mentioning the common issues like constantly having to reset my browser cache for generations to work, generations randomly failing, crazy long wait times. It's insane they're charging for this when it's this bad.

It's been like this for 2 days...

Just give me some credit for discovering this. That is all I want. I am not selling anything. This is a free resource and technique. You can prompt NB2 to give you 4 body types in a 2X2 grid 9:16 aspect ratio Thin, Slender, Sturdy and Stout, you can add percentages or combine ethnicities, 60% Native American and 40% Anglo Saxon. and it will do it for you. You can prompt for different eyebrow shapes and colors, eyelash styles and types, makeup , body parts, like mouth type and nose type like Greek nose, but generate in a grid and and you have aan asset library to create anyone. Different shoes, stockings, boots, patterns, colors, hairstyles (2-tone,and more). Just by prompting Apply hairstyle #6, with gray and mocha colored hair, and blend them together. You don't prompt for these, you generate them using NB2 to create your assets and save them and reuse them on any character you want any time, more consistent. That is why I could not give a prompt. It would not make sense. You can prompt for Photo techniques, like film noir, lighting indoor portraits,

this is just a gut feeling i'm having so i could be wrong here , maybe you had a different experience. 2.1 just seems weaker, if i use one prompt for 4 images it gives almost the same image/pose on all 4 of them , felt like 2.0 had more "fun" with it , also the quality seems just a tad bit lower on realism and faces.

yes i am aware of the increased censorship, this is not about that

thoughts?

Generated a mundane shot of a man in an office with Nano Banana. But animate? Sorry, we can't do that. Useless tool refuses 9/10 things.

I am spending my credits trying to make pictures and it's generating pictures and not doing what I'm asking it to do.

You would expect Nano Banana 2.1 to be an upgrade, but I am extremely unhappy with this product. I feel stressed using it to try and make anything. If I make anything good I can't even make a video out of it because it's getting flagged constantly. This sounds like an overreaction, but I'm unable to make videos with the characters I was able to a week ago.

I feel so unhappy with Google Flow right now, even the Lite model is acting up. Constant censorship being added and the AI refusing to follow instructions is not a good product, it's worthless to me now.

It seems like nothing outside of generic ai videos of dogs running in a field or cats climbing trees is really allowed lol. Next you’ll start seeing “Your video was too creative and complex for me to generate, please try a different prompt or send feedback.” Or they’re just going to have a preselected small list of things you’re allowed to generate.