Google’s latest lightweight model can nail a clickbait headline but struggles to sound truly human when the stakes are higher. Here’s how it performed across four key writing capabilities.
Gemini 3 Flash is a faster, cheaper alternative to Google’s flagship models. It’s built for speed and everyday tasks. Alex Goldstein, a senior creative writer in our language team put it through eight real-world writing tests, and the results were all over the place. It aced the snappy stuff, fumbled badly on tone, and delivered a masterclass in how to write like a committee when asked to sound like a person.
Sales and customer messages
Score: 4.5/10
This was rough. When tasked with writing an email to coworking space members about the end of free coffee, Gemini 3 Flash produced something technically on brief, but also lifeless, meandering, and full of the kind of jargon that would make you want to cancel your membership on principle.
“To maintain the high standard of facilities you expect, we are making a change to our refreshment offering.”
Alex says: “It’s on brief and more or less coherent – but it’s also boring, long-winded corporate waffle that buries the lede.”
Just say the coffee isn’t free anymore.
The product description for noise-cancelling headphones started promisingly with “Silence the noise, find your flow,” but quickly descended into buzzword soup: “sophisticated, minimalist aesthetic,” “ergonomic earcups,” “elevate your daily routine.”
As Alex put it, bullet points could replace entire paragraphs here.
Snappy headlines and titles
Score: 8.5/10
Here’s where Gemini 3 Flash shone. Its tabloid headline:
GREEN GULLI-BULLY: The ‘eco’ household brands that are TRASHING the planet more than regular ones
was tonally spot on and totally usable with a light edit.
“The rest of the headline fits the brief, gets the tone and doesn’t need lots of work to polish (though I’d cut the word ‘household’ to make it punchier).”
Even better was its YouTube title:
I Quit Sugar For 30 Days And My Body Changed In Ways I Didn’t Expect
It’s textbook clickbait. Annoyingly effective.
Alex’s verdict?
“I hate it on principle, but I can’t fault it on execution.”
When the brief is to grab attention in a couple of seconds, Gemini 3 Flash delivers.
Names
Score: 5.5/10
The model’s naming efforts were safe to the point of invisibility.
For a posture-correcting wearable, it offered options ranging from the obvious (Straighten) to the vaguely clever (Aligna, CoreCue) to the bafflingly abstract (Verve).
Nothing that made you sit up. Nothing that felt like it understood the tech angle.
The dating app names fared slightly worse: Unswipe and AntiDate sound like hookup apps. RealTalk feels like a forum. And while The Last Resort showed a bit of edge, most of the list felt like it came from a very earnest brainstorm that ran out of steam around idea four.
Tone adaptation and clarity
Score: 3.5/10
This was Gemini 3 Flash’s weakest showing.
Asked to rewrite luxury catering copy for two different audiences (a corporate events manager and a bride-to-be), it did technically produce two different tones. But both were stunningly dull.
The corporate version leaned so hard into boardroom speak it became a parody: “unmatched logistical expertise,” “seamless, high-impact event.”
The wedding version wasn’t much better: “style, soul, and incredible food” sounds like it was written by someone who’s never been to a wedding.
Alex says: “Both are equally, if differently, boring and there’s no attempt to play with structure.”
Worse still was the rewrite to make a paragraph about quantum encryption clear for 12-year-olds.
It patronised its audience from the off with phrases like, “the amazing world of physics”.
Simplifying language doesn’t mean dumbing it down.
Alex continues, “The Economist writes for an ‘intelligent 8-year-old’, so actually younger than the task here, which is ~12yo; they’d never condescend about the ‘amazing world of physics’.”
Overall score: 5.5/10
| Use it for | Avoid it for |
| Punchy tasks like headlines, the kind of stuff where formula works and overthinking doesn’t. | Longer-form copy that requires warmth, nuance or tonal sophistication. |
Gemini 3 Flash is a model of extremes.
If you need fast, functional content for social or performance marketing, Gemini 3 Flash might be a great model. If you need something customer-facing that needs to sound conversational and human, there are stronger options.
Like GPT-5.1 or Sonnet 4.5 perhaps.
Book a custom Definition AI demoWritten by AI consultant Tom Pallot and creative director Alex Goldstein.
