I’ve discovered a serious issue that other users have been reporting in recent days. When a historic chat includes a video as input, the system often responds: “Failed to generate content” for new prompts.
To continue the conversation, I have to manually scroll through potentially hundreds of thousands of tokens to find and delete every message that contained a video input. Only then does the chat work properly again.
This is a major bug because it makes long, valuable threads essentially unusable if any video was shared. Please address this so users can continue conversations without having to purge their history.
I want to clarify the issue in detail to avoid any confusion.
Currently, if I am actively chatting in a thread, I can upload a video file and discuss it with the model (sometimes even that doesn’t work, though the video is nowhere near the token limit).
However, once the chat is closed or reopened, or after a few days, the problem appears: any historic chat that included a video input will block new prompts.
I’ve tested this multiple times across different chats. After dozens of failed attempts, where the model responded: “Failed to generate content”, I deleted a single video from the chat history. On the next attempt, the generation worked perfectly—no more failure.
Importantly, the video itself was never the problem: while it was uploaded in real-time, I could discuss it with the model without issue. The bug only appears in historic sessions.
This is a critical bug. In long chats, it’s practically impossible to locate which single video in the history is causing the block. This makes many valuable threads unusable until a very tedious manual cleanup is performed.
I’ve verified this multiple times—it’s consistent and reproducible. Fixing this is urgent.
@user1887,
Thanks for the feedback. we will try to reproduce this on our end.
just FYI the root cause of this might be the fact that ai studio uses “files api” to upload the video file and use that for the chat but the retention of the files in “files api” is 2 days. when you try to access the chat after 2 days from the initial upload i would assume the gemini api has no way to reference that file you have initially uploaded. now when you delete the previous uploaded instance in the chat history and upload the video once again i would assume that the chat should go as expected.
Thank you