Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)

With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.

What a time to be alive.

I think part of the issue with architects and designers today is that they use CAD too much. It's easy to design boxes and basic roof lines in CAD. It's harder to put in curves and more craftsman features. Nano Banana's renders have more organic design features IMO.

Our house is looking great and we're very happy how it's going so far with a lot of the thanks to Nano Banana.

The "cubism" example seems like it would be a closer fit to something like stained glass or something. I don't think the thing really understands what cubism was all about. Cubist painters were trying to free themselves from the confines of a single integral plane of perspective by allowing themselves to show various parts of the image from different viewpoints, different times, different styles, etc.

The division of the image into geometric shapes is just a by-product of that quest, whereas the examples here have made it the sum total of the whole piece.

This feels to me like an example of how LLMs still don't "understand" what the art means, and are just aping its facade.

You can argue things like code generation are an extension of the engineer wielding it. Image generation just seems like a net negative overall if it’s used at scale.

Edit: By scale, I mean large corporations putting content in front of millions. I understand the appeal for smaller businesses where they probably weren’t going to pay an artist anyway.

Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.

Here's some of my captions that tend to trip up even state-of-the-art models.

https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-pro-2-tests

So far it does feel more iterative than an entirely new leap in terms of capabilities, but I haven't run it through the more multimodal aspects such as editing existing images.

That being said, it actually managed the King Louie jump rope test which surprised me.

I guess even Google is running out of GPUs.

And not a (botched) fake white/gray grid background that is commonly used to visualize transparency?

- Base pricing for a 1024x1024 image is almost 1.6x what normal Nano Banana is ($0.067 vs. $0.039), however you can now get a 512x512 image for cheaper, or a 4k image for cheaper than four 1k images: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-3.1-fla...

- Thinking is now configurable between `Minimal` and `High` (was not the case with Nano Banana Pro)

- Safety of the model appears to be increased so typical copyright infringing/NSFW content is difficult to generate (it refused to let me generate cartoon characters having taken psychedelics)

- Generation speed is really slow (2-3min per image) but that may be due to load.

- Prompt adherence to my trickier prompts for Nano Banana Pro (https://minimaxir.com/2025/12/nano-banana-pro/) is much worse, unsurprisingly. For example I asked it to make a 5x2 grid with 10 given inputs and it keeps making 4x3 grids with duplicate inputs.

However, I am skeptical with their marquee feature: image search. Anyone who has used Nano Banana Pro for awhile knows that it will strongly overfit on any input images by copy/pasting the subject without changes which is bad for creativity, and I suspect this implementation appears the same.

Additionally I have a test prompt which exploits the January 2025 knowledge cutoff:

    Generate a photo of the KPop Demon Hunters performing a concert at Golden Gate Park in their concert outfits.

tl;dr the example images (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-image/flash/) seem similar to Nano Banana Pro which is indeed a big quality improvement but even relative to base Nano Banana it's unclear if it justifies a "2" subtitle especially given the increased cost.

> I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill your request as it contains conflicting instructions. You asked me to include the self-carved markings on the character's right wrist and to show him clutching his electromancy focus, but you also explicitly stated, "Do NOT include any props, weapons, or objects in the character's hands - hands should be empty." This contradiction prevents me from generating the image as requested.

My prompts are automated (e.g. I'm not writing them) and definitely have contained conflicting instructions in the past.

A quick google search on that error doesn't reveal anything either

Just think we conceptually know what a brushless motor design looks like and it's just pixels. I guess even if it did produce the image we wouldn't know what it means.