I recently finished putting together an Editing Comparison Showdown counterpart where the focus is still adherence but testing the ability to make localized edits of existing images using pure text prompts. It's currently comparing 6 multimodal models including Nano-Banana, Kontext Max, Qwen 20b, etc.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
Gemini Flash 2.5 leads with a score of 7 out of 12, but Kontext comes in at 5 out of 12 which is especially surprising considering you can run the Dev model of it locally.
Don't know if it's the same for others, but my issue with Nano Banana has been the opposite. Ask it to make x significant change, and it spits out what I would've sworn is the same image. Sometimes randomly and inexplicably it spits our the expected result.
Anyone else experiencing this or have solutions for avoiding this?
Most models (gpt-image-1, Kontext, etc) typically fail by doing the wrong thing.
From my testing this seems to be a Nano-Banana issue. I've found you can occasionally work around it by adding far more explicit directives to the prompt but there's no guarantee.
I agree with your assessment - even though it does tend to make changes at a global level you can least attempt to minimize its alterations through careful prompting.
Since the page doesn't mention it, this is the Google Gemini Image Generation model: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-generation
Good collection of examples. Really weird to choose an inappropriate for work one as the second example.
Came within striking distance of OpenAI gpt-image-1 at only one point less.
The second example under "Case 1: Illustration to Figure" is a panty shot.
I get far better results using ChatGPT for example. Of course, the character seldom looks anything like the reference, but it looks better than what I could do in paint in two minutes.
Am I using the wrong model, somehow??
When Nano Banana works well, it really works -- but 90% of the time the results will be weird or of poor quality, with what looks like cut-and-paste or paint-over, and it also refuses a lot of reasonable requests on "safety" grounds. (In my experience, almost anything with real people.)
I'm mostly annoyed, rather than impressed, with it.
I was a bit surprised to see quality. Last time I played around with image generation is a few months back and I’m more in the frustration camp. Not to say that I believe some people with more time and dedication at their hand can tickle better results.
I understand the results are non deterministic but I get absolute garbage too.
Uploaded pics of my (32 years old) wife and we wanted to ask it to give her a fringe/bangs to see how would she look like it either refused "because of safety" and when it complied results were horrible, it was a different person.
After many days and tries we got it to make one but there was no way to tweak the fringe, the model kept returning the same pic every time (with plenty of "content blocked" in between).
- The second one in case 2 doesn't look anything like the reference map
- The face in case 5 changes completely despite the model being instructed to not do that
- Case 8 ignores the provided pose reference
- Case 9 changes the car positions
- Case 16 labels the tricuspid in the wrong place and I have no idea what a "mittic" is
- Case 27 shows the usual "models can't do text" though I'm not holding that against it too much
- Same with case 29, as well as the text that is readable not relating to the parts of the image it is referencing
- Case 33 just generated a generic football ground
- Case 37 has nonsensical labellings ("Define Jawline" attached to the eye)
- Case 58 has the usual "models don't understand what a wireframe is", but again I'm not holding that against it too much
Super nice to see how honest they are about the capabilities!
> - Case 27 shows the usual "models can't do text" though I'm not holding that against it too much
16 makes it seem like it can "do text" — almost, if we don't care what it says. But it looks very crisp until you notice the "Pul??nary Artereys".
I'd say the bigger problem with 27 is that asking to add a watermark also took the scroll out of the woman's hands.
(While I'm looking, 28 has a lot of things wrong with it on closer inspection. I said 26 originally because I randomly woke up in the middle of the night for this and apparently I don't know which way I'm scrolling.)
Also you're right, I didn't notice the scroll had gone, though on another inspection, it's also removed the original prompter's watermark
48 is impossible to do in a way that is accurate and meaningful
Through that testing, there is one prompt engineering trend that was consistent but controversial: both a) LLM-style prompt engineering with with Markdown-formated lists and b) old-school AI image style quality syntatic sugar such as award-winning and DSLR camera are both extremely effective with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, due to its text encoder and larger training dataset which can now more accurately discriminate which specific image traits are present in an award-winning image and what traits aren't. I've tried generations both with and without those tricks and the tricks definitely have an impact. Google's developer documentation encourages the latter.
However, taking advantage of the 32k context window (compared to 512 for most other models) can make things interesting. It’s possible to render HTML as an image (https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/blob/main/docs/notebooks...) and providing highly nuanced JSON can allow for consistent generations. (https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/blob/main/docs/notebooks...)
(Example: Half of Case 1 is an anime/manga maid-uniform woman lifting up front of skirt, and leaning back, to expose the crotch of underwear. That's the most questionable one I noticed. It's one of the first things a visitor to the top URL sees.)
Edit: It still blocks this request.
We all know the questionable nature of AI/LLM models, but people in the field usually at least try to avoid directly using other people's copyrighted material in documentation.
I'm not even talking about legality here. It just feels morally wrong to so blatantly use someone else's artwork like this.
Source of artist: https://x.com/curry3_aiart/status/1947416300822638839
This is why we can't have nice things. How about we let the models remain uncensored and you don't generate NSFW with them?
- Given a face shot in direct sunlight with severe shadows, it would not remove the shadows
- Given an old black and white photo, it would not render the image in vibrant color as if taken with a modern DSLR camera. It will colorize the photo, but only with washed out, tinted colors
- When trying to reproduce the 3 x 3 grid of hair styles, it repeatedly created a 2x3 grid. Finally, it made a 3x3 grid, but one of the nine models was black instead of caucasian.
- It is unable to integrate real images into fabricated imagery. For example, when given an image of a tutu and asked to create an image of a dolphin flying over clouds wearing the tutu, the result looks like a crude photoshop snip and copy/paste job.
I uploaded an image I found of Midtown Manhattan and tried various times to get it to highlight the Chrysler Building, it claimed it wasn't in the image (it was). I asked it to do 432 Park Ave, and it literally inserted a random building in the middle of the image that was not 432 Park, and gave me some garbled text for the description. I then tried Chicago as pictured from museum campus and asked it to highlight 2 Prudential, and it inserted the Hancock Center, which was not visible in the image I uploaded, and while the text was not garbled, was incorrect.
The "Photos of Yourself in Different Eras" one said "Don't change the character's face" but the face was totally changed. "Case 21: OOTD Outfit" used the wrong camera. "Virtual Makeup Try-On" messed up the make up. "Lighting Control" messed up the lighting, the joker minifig is literally just SH0133 (https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?M=sh0133), "Design a Chess Set" says you don't need an input image, but the prompt said to base it off of a picture that wasn't included and the output is pretty questionable (WTF is with those pawns!), etc.
I mean, it's still pretty neat, and could be useful for people without access to photoshop or to get someone started on a project to finish up by hand.
I don't know of a demo, image, film, project or whatever where the showoff pieces are not cherry picked.
Huge thanks to the author (and the many contributors) as well for gathering so many examples; it’s incredibly useful to see them to better understand the possibilities of the tool.
AI is like Batman, useless without his money and utility belt. Your own abilities are more like Superman, part of who you are and always with you, ready for use.
"To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower..."
We - humans - have reasons to be. We get to look at a sunset and think about the scattering of light and different frequencies and how it causes the different colors. But we can also just enjoy the beauty of it.
For me, every moment is magical when I take the time to let it be so. Heck, for there to even be a me responding to a you and all of the things that had to happen for Hacker News to be here. It's pretty incredible. To me anyway.
I’ve no idea how to even check. According to various tests I believe I have aphantasia. But mostly I’ve got not even a slightest idea on how not having it is supposed to work. I guess this is one of those mysteries when a missing sense cannot be described in any manner.
Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.
In my conscious experience I pretty much imagine {apple, dot, dot, dot}. I don't "see" blue, the dots are tagged with dot.color == blue.
When you ask about the arrangement of the dots, I'll THEN think about it, and then says "arranged in a triangle." But that's because you've probed with your question. Before you probed, there's no concept in my mind of any geometric arrangement.
If I hadn't been prompted to think / naturally thought about the color of the apple, and you asked me "what color is the apple." Only then would I say "green" or "red."
If you asked me to describe my office (for example) my brain can't really imagine it "holistically." I can think of the desk and then enumerate it's properties: white legs, wooden top, rug on ground. But, essentially, I'm running a geometric iterator over the scene, starting from some anchor object, jumping to nearby objects, and then enumerating their properties.
I have glimpses of what it's like to "see" in my minds eye. At night, in bed, just before sleep, if I concentrate really hard, I can sometimes see fleeting images. I liken it to looking at one of those eye puzzles where you have to relax your eyes to "see it." I almost have to focus on "seeing" without looking into the blackness of my closed eyes.
No one really sees 3d pictures in their head in HD
It not just images either, it's short videos.
What's interesting though is that the "video" can be missing details that I will "hallucinate" back in that will be incorrect. So I cannot always fully trust these. Like cutting the apple in half lead to a ~1/8th slice missing from one of the halves. It's weird.
It's equally astonishing to me that others are different.
You may notice when doing the apple test, once you try and define a texture, your brain adding things you think should be there.
Scared the crap out of me a few years ago when I realized I had it. Came to grips with it now.
How do people with aphantasia answer the question?
Then maybe, at least in my case, it is my inability to focus my imagination when my senses are already being bombarded with external stimuli. But I cannot speak for anyone else.
I hadn't really placed those three dots in a specific place on the apple. But when you ask where they are, I'll decide to put them in a line on the apple. If you ask what color they are, I'll have to decide.
That is, they have to ascribe a placement rather than describe one in the image their mind conjured up.
Edit: This iDevice really wants to capitalise Apple.
I have had some people claim to me that they can literally see what they are imagining as if it is in front of them for prolonged periods of time, in a similar way to how it would show up via AR goggles.
I guess this is a spectrum and it's tough to dealineate the abilities. But I just looked it up and what I am describing is hyperphantasia.
I have aphantasia and my dog isn't anywhere. It's just a dog, you didn't ask me to visualize anything else.
When you ask about details, like color, tail length, eyes then I have to make them up on the spot. I can do that very quickly but I don't "see" the good boy.
Arguably, if creating an art style is simply a matter of novel mechanics and uniqueness, LLMs could already do that simply by adding artists to the prompts ("X" in the style of "A" and "B") and plenty of people did (and do) argue that this is no different than what human artists do (I would disagree.) I personally want to argue that intentionally matters more than raw technique, but Hacker News would require a strict proof for the definition of intentionality that they would argue humans don't possess, but somehow LLMs do, and that of course I can't provide.
I guess I have no argument besides "it means more to me that a person does it than a machine." It matters to me that a human artist cares. A machine doesn't care. And yes, in a strictly materialist sense we are nothing but black boxes of neurons receiving stimuli and there is no fundamental difference between a green field and a cold steel rail, it's all just math and meat, but I still don't care if a machine makes X in the style of (Jack Kirby AND Frank Miller.)
I'd disagree. Art styles are a category of many similar works in relation to others or a way of bringing about similar works. They usually build off of or are influenced by prior work and previous methods, even in cases where there is a effort to avoid or subvert them. Even with novel techniques or new mediums. "Great Artists Steal" and all that.
Some people become known for certain mediums or the inclusion of specific elements, but few of them were the first or only artists to use them. "Art in the style of X" just comes down to familiarity/marketing. Art develops the way food does with fads, standards, cycles, and with technology and circumstance enabling new things. I think evolution is a pretty good analogy although it's driven by a certain amount of creativity, personal preference, and intent in addition to randomness and natural selection.
Computers could output random noise and in the process eventually end up creating an art style, but it'd take a human to recognize anything valuable and artists to incorporate it into other works. Right now what passes for AI is just remixing existing art created by humans which makes it more likely to blindly stumble into creating some output we like, but inspiration can come from anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if the "AI Slop" art style wasn't already inspiring human artists. Maybe there are already painters out there doing portraits of people with the wrong number of fingers. As AI is increasingly consuming it's own slop things could get weird enough to inspire new styles, or alternately homogenized into nothing but blandness.
We're reliant on training data too.
There are now dozens of copyright safe image and video models: Adobe, MoonValley, etc.
We technically never need human works again. We can generate everything synthetically (unreal engine, cameras on a turn table, etc.)
The physics of optics is just incredibly easy to evolve.
Not sure about that. Humans are doing almost all the work now still.
Nano banana saves literally millions of manual human pixel pushing hours.
It's easy to hate on LLMs and AI hype, but image models are changing the world and impacting every visual industry.
Conscious intelligence has not.
As another argument, we've had mathematical descriptions of optics, drawing algorithms, fixed function pipeline, ray tracing, and so much more rich math for drawing and animating.
Smart, thinking machines? We haven't the faintest idea.
Progress on Generative Images >> LLMs
Three times, something like intelligence has evolved - in mammals, octopuses, and corvids. Completely different neural architectures in those unrelated speces.
Even with what we've got, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to invent indoor plumbing.
Vision, I still submit, is much simpler than "intelligence". It's evolved independently almost a hundred times.
It's also hypothesized that it takes as few as a hundred thousand years to evolve advanced eye optics:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1994.004...
Even plants can sense the visual and physical world. Three dimensional spatial relationships and paths and rays through them are not hard.
You are now marvelling at someone taking the collective output of humans around the world, then training a model on it with massive, massive compute… and then having a single human compete with that model.
Without the human output on the Internet, none of this would be possible. ImageNet was positively small compared to this.
But yeah, what you call “imagination” is basically perturbations and exploration across a model that you have in your head, which imposes constraints (eg gravity etc) that you learned. Obviously we can remix things now that they’re on the Internet.
Having said that, after all that compute, the models had trouble rendering clocks that show an arbitrary time, or a glass of wine filled to the brim.
I know you're probably talking about analog clocks, but people when dreaming have trouble representing stable digits on clocks. It's one of the methods to tell if you are dreaming.
You're
Does a pretty good job (most of the time) of sticking to the black and white coloring book style while still bringing in enough detail to recognize the original photo in the output.