[HN Gopher] Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI ...
___________________________________________________________________
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI image
generation
Author : minimaxir
Score : 840 points
Date : 2025-11-13 17:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (minimaxir.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (minimaxir.com)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| lots of words
|
| okay, look at imagen 4 ultra:
|
| https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
|
| In this link, Imagen is instructed to render the verbatim prompt
| "the result of 4+5", which shows that text, and not instructed,
| which renders "4+5=9"
|
| Is Imagen thinking?
|
| Let's compare to gemini 2.5 flash image (nano banana):
|
| look carefully at the system prompt here:
| https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
|
| Gemini is instructed to reply in images first, and if it thinks,
| to think using the image thinking tags. It cannot seemingly be
| prompted to show verbatim the result 4+5 without showing the
| answer 4+5=9. Of course it can show whatever exact text that you
| want, the question is, does it prompt rewrite (no) or do
| something else (yes)?
|
| compare to ideogram, with prompt rewriting:
| https://ideogram.ai/g/GRuZRTY7TmilGUHnks-Mjg/0
|
| without prompt rewriting:
| https://ideogram.ai/g/yKV3EwULRKOu6LDCsSvZUg/2
|
| We can do the same exercises with Flux Kontext for editing versus
| Flash-2.5, if you think that editing is somehow unique in this
| regard.
|
| Is prompt rewriting "thinking"? My point is, this article can't
| answer that question without dElViNg into the nuances of what
| multi-modal models really are.
| gryfft wrote:
| Can you provide screenshots or links that don't require login
| PunchTornado wrote:
| sorry, but I don't understand you post. those links don't work.
| dostick wrote:
| Use Google AI Studio to submit requests, and to remove watermark,
| open browser development tools and right click on request to
| "watermark_4" image and select to block it. And from next
| generation there will be no watermark!
| billynomates wrote:
| That sounds dangerous honestly. Watermarks should be mandatory
| for AI generated images.
| dymk wrote:
| How would you enforce that when it's actually important? Any
| "bad actor" could just open photoshop and remove it. Or run a
| delobotimized model which doesn't watermark.
| dieortin wrote:
| This only applies to the visible watermark on the corner,
| which you could crop anyways. If I'm not mistaken, all images
| generated by Google models have an invisible watermark:
| https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
| dreis_sw wrote:
| So the watermark is being added to the image on the client-
| side? That's pretty bad
| wormpilled wrote:
| Can't believe that worked, thanks!
| squigz wrote:
| I'm getting annoyed by using "prompt engineered" as a verb. Does
| this mean I'm finally old and bitter?
|
| (Do we say we software engineered something?)
| vpShane wrote:
| You're definitely old and bitter, welcome to it.
|
| You CREATED something, and I like to think that creating things
| that I love and enjoy and that others can love and enjoy makes
| creating things worth it.
| squigz wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against using AI as an
| expression of creativity :)
| malcolmxxx wrote:
| Create? So I have created all that code I'm running on my
| site, yes is bad I know, but thank you very much! Such
| creative guy I was!
| officeplant wrote:
| Not really since "prompt engineering" can be tossed in the same
| pile as "vibe coding." Just people coping with not developing
| the actual skills to produce the desired products.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Couldn't care less. I don't need to know how to do literally
| everything. AI fills in my gaps and I'm a ton more
| productive.
| squigz wrote:
| I wouldn't bother trying to convince people who are upset
| that others have figured out a way to use LLMs. It's not
| logical.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Try getting a small model to do what you want quickly with
| high accuracy, high quality, etc, and using few tokens per
| request. You'll find out that prompt engineering is real and
| matters.
| pavlov wrote:
| I think it's meant to be engineering in the same sense as
| "social engineering".
| antegamisou wrote:
| No it means you can still discern what is BS.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| Theres lots these models can do but I despise when people suggest
| they can do edits with "with only the necessary aspects changed".
|
| No, that simply is not true. If you actually compare the before
| and after you can see it still regenerates all the details on the
| "unchanged" aspects. Texture, lighting, sharpness, even scale its
| all different even if varyingly similar to the original.
|
| Sure they're cute for casual edits but it really pains me people
| suggesting these things are suitable replacements for actual
| photo editing. Especially when it comes to people, or details
| outside their training data theres a lot of nuance that can be
| lost as it regenerates them no matter how you prompt things.
|
| Even if you
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| That is true for gpt-image-1 but not nano-banana. They can do
| masked image changes
| minimaxir wrote:
| Nano Banana is different and much better at edits without
| changing texture/lighting/sharpness/color balance, and I am
| someone that is extremely picky about it. That's why I add the
| note that Gemini 2.5 Flash is aware of segmentation masks, and
| that's my hunch why that's the case.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Nano banana has a really low spatial scaling and doesn't affect
| details like other models.
| miohtama wrote:
| Could you just mask out the area you wish to change in more
| advanced tools, or is there something in the model itself which
| would prevent this?
| lunarboy wrote:
| That's probably where things are headed and there are already
| products trying this (even photoshop already). Just like how
| code gen AI tools don't replace the entire file on every
| prompt iteration.
| mkagenius wrote:
| > Nano Banana is still bad at rendering text perfectly/without
| typos as most image generation models.
|
| I figured that if you write the text in Google docs and share the
| screenshot with banana it will not make any spelling mistake.
|
| So, use something like "can you write my name on this Wimbledon
| trophy, both images are attached. Use them" will work.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Google's example documentation for Nano Banana does demo that
| pipeline: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-
| generation#pytho...
|
| That's on my list of blog-post-worthy things to test, namely
| text rendering to image in Python directly and passing both
| input images to the model for compositing.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Yeah, close.
|
| But it is still generating it with a prompt
|
| > Logo: "A simple, modern logo with the letters 'G' and 'A'
| in a white circle.
|
| My idea was do to it manually so that there is no
| probabilities involved.
|
| Though your idea of using python is same.
| ml-anon wrote:
| "prompt engineered"...i.e. by typing in what you want to see.
| harpiaharpyja wrote:
| Not all models can actually do that if your prompt is
| particular
| pksebben wrote:
| Most designers can't, either. Defining a spec is a skill.
|
| It's actually fairly difficult to put to words any specific
| enough vision such that it becomes understandable outside of
| your own head. This goes for pretty much anything, too.
| Razengan wrote:
| Yep, knowing how and what to _ask_ is a skill.
|
| For anything, even back in the "classical" search days.
| pksebben wrote:
| at least then, we had hard overrides that were actually
| hard.
|
| "This got searched verbatim, every time"
|
| W*ldcards were handy
|
| and so on...
|
| Now, you get a 'system prompt' which is a vague promise
| that no really this bit of text is special you can
| totally trust us (which inevitably dies, crushed under
| the weight of an extended context window).
|
| Unfortunately(?), I think this bug/feature has gotta be
| there. It's the price for the enormous flexibility.
| Frankly, I'd not be mad if we had _less_ control - my
| guess is that in not too many years we 're going to look
| back on RLHF and grimace at our draconian methods. Yeah,
| if you're only trying to build a "get the thing I intend
| done" machine I guess it's useful, but I think the real
| power in these models is in their propensity to expose
| you to new ideas and provide a tireless foil for all the
| half-baked concepts that would otherwise not get room to
| grow.
| andai wrote:
| https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-
| people-a...
| deathanatos wrote:
| ... sure ... but also no. For example, say I have an image.
| 3 people in it; there is a speech bubble above the person
| on the right that reads "I'A'T AY RO HERT YOU THE SAP!"1
|
| I give it, Reposition the text bubble to be
| coming from the middle character. DO NOT modify
| the poses or features of the actual characters.
|
| Now sure, specs are hard. Gemini removed the text bubble
| entirely. Whatever, let's just try again:
| Place a speech bubble on the image. The "tail" of the
| bubble should make it appear that the middle (red-headed)
| girl is talking. The speech bubble should read "Hide the
| vodka." Use a Comic Sans like font. DO NOT place the bubble
| on the right. DO NOT modify the characters in
| the image.
|
| There's only one red-head in the image; she's the middle
| character. We get a speech bubble, correctly positioned,
| but with a sans-serif, Arial-ish font, not Comic Sans. It
| reads "Hide the vokda" _(sic)_. The facial expression of
| the middle character has changed.
|
| Yes, specs are hard. Defining a spec is hard. But Gemini
| struggles to follow the specification given. _Whole
| sessions_ are like this, and absolute struggle to get basic
| directions followed.
|
| You can even see here that I & the author have started to
| learn the SHOUT AT IT rule. I suppose I should try more
| bulleted lists. Someone might learn, through
| experimentation "okay, the AI has these hidden
| idiosyncrasies that I can abuse to get what I want" but ...
| that's not a good thing, that's just an undocumented API
| with a terrible UX.
|
| (1because that is what the AI on a previous step generated.
| No, that's not what was asked for. I am astounded TFA
| generated an NYT logo for this reason.)
| minimaxir wrote:
| The NYT logo being rendered well makes sense because it's
| a _logo_ , not a textual concept.
| pksebben wrote:
| You're right, of course. These models have deficiencies
| in their understanding related to the sophistication of
| the text encoder and it's relationship to the underlying
| tokenizer.
|
| Which is exactly why the current discourse is about 'who
| does it best' (IMO, the flux series is top dog here. No
| one else currently strikes the proper balance between
| following style / composition / text rendering quite as
| well). That said, even flux is pretty tricky to prompt -
| it's really, really easy to step on your own toes here -
| for example, by giving conflicting(ish) prompts "The
| scene is shot from a high angle. We see the bottom of a
| passenger jet".
|
| Talking to designers has the same problem. "I want a
| nice, clean logo of a distressed dog head. It should be
| sharp with a gritty feel". For the person defining the
| spec, they actually do have a vision that fits each
| criteria _in some way_ , but it's unclear which parts
| apply to what.
| darepublic wrote:
| "amenable to highly specific and granular instruction"
| simonw wrote:
| ... and then iterating on that prompt many times, based on your
| accumulated knowledge of how best to prompt that particular
| model.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Case in point, the final image in this post (the IP bonanza)
| took 28 iterations of the prompt text to get something
| maximally interesting, and why that one is very particular
| about the constraints it invokes, such as specifying
| "distinct" characters and specifying they are present from
| "left to right" because the model kept exploiting that
| ambiguity.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Hey! The author, thank you for this post! QQ, any idea
| roughly how much this experimentation cost you? I'm having
| trouble processing their image generation pricing I may
| just not be finding the right table. I'm just trying to
| understand if I do like 50 iterations at the quality in the
| post, how much is that going to cost me?
| minimaxir wrote:
| All generations in the post are $0.04/image (Nano Banana
| doesn't have a way to increase the resolution, yet), so
| you can do the math and assume that you can generated
| about 24 images per dollar: unlike other models, Nano
| Banana does charge for input tokens but it's neligible.
|
| Discounting the testing around the character JSON which
| became _extremely_ expensive due to extreme iteration /my
| own stupidity, I'd wager it took about $5 total including
| iteration.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| We understand now that we interface with LLMs using natural and
| unnatural language as the user interface.
|
| This is a very different fuzzy interface compared to
| programming languages.
|
| There will be techniques better or worse at interfacing.
|
| This is what the term prompt engineering is alluding to since
| we don't have the full suite of language to describe this yet.
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| Yes, that is a serious skill. How many of the woes that we see
| is because people don't know what they want or are unable to
| describe it in such a way that others understand it. I believe
| prompt engineer to properly convey how complex communication
| can be, when interacting with a multitude of perspectives,
| world views, assumptions, presumptions etc. I believe it works
| well to counter the over-confidence that people have, from not
| paying attention to what gaps exist between what is said and
| what is meant.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Yes, obviously a role involving complex communication while
| interacting with a multitude of perspectives, world views,
| assumptions, presumptions, etc needs to be called "engineer."
|
| That is why I always call technical writers "documentation
| engineers," why I call diplomats "international engineers,"
| why I call managers "team engineers," and why I call
| historians "hindsight engineers."
| w_for_wumbo wrote:
| I believe you're joking here, but I do think it'd be useful
| to have some engineering background in each of these
| domains. The number of miscommunications that happen in any
| domain, due to oversight, presumptions and assumptions is
| vast. At the very least the terminology will shape how we
| engage with it, so having an aspirational title like prompt
| engineer, may influence the level of rigor we apply to it.
| croon wrote:
| I think what you're describing is more commonly included
| under epistemology under philosophy, and I agree that it
| would be a useful background in each of those domains,
| but for some reason in the last few decades we have
| downgraded the humanities as less useful.
|
| So Prompt Philosopher/Communicator?
| drw85 wrote:
| I don't think that's the right direction to go in.
|
| Despite needing much knowledge of how a planes inner
| workings function, a pilot is still a pilot and not an
| aircraft engineer.
|
| Just because you know how human psychology works when it
| comes to making purchase decision and you are good at
| applying that to sell things, you're not a sales
| engineer.
|
| Giving something a fake name, to make it seem more
| complicated or aspirational than it actually is makes you
| a bullshit engineer in my opinion.
| ml-anon wrote:
| it's really unclear whether this is satire.
| thisOtterBeGood wrote:
| It IS a skill. And most often it is disregarded by those who
| did not yet conquer it ...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Used to be called Google Fu
| yieldcrv wrote:
| right? 15 months ago in image models you used to have to
| designate rendering specifications, and know the art of
| negative prompting
|
| now you can really use natural language and people want to
| debate you about how poor they are at articulating a shared
| concepts, amazing
|
| it's like the people are regressing and the AI is improving
| pfortuny wrote:
| Well, I just asked it for a 13-sided irregular polygon (is it
| that hard?)...
|
| https://imgur.com/a/llN7V0W
| BoredPositron wrote:
| The kicker for nano banana is not prompt adherence which is a
| really nice to have but the fact that it's either working on
| pixel space or with a really low spatial scaling. It's the only
| model that doesn't kill your details because of vae
| encode/decode.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| It's really cool how good of a job it did rendering a page given
| its HTML code. I was not expecting it to do nearly as well.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Same. This must have training from sites that show html next to
| screenshots of the pages.
| leviathant wrote:
| I was kind of surprised by this line:
|
| >Nano Banana is terrible at style transfer even with prompt
| engineering shenanigans
|
| My context: I'm kind of fixated on visualizing my neighborhood as
| it would have appeared in the 18th century. I've been doing it in
| Sketchup, and then in Twinmotion, but neither of those produce
| "photorealistic" images... Twinmotion can get pretty close with a
| lot of work, but that's easier with modern architecture than it
| is with the more hand-made, brick-by-brick structures I'm
| modeling out.
|
| As different AI image generators have emerged, I've tried them
| all in an effort to add the proverbial rough edges to snapshots
| of the models I've created, and it was not until Nano Banana that
| I ever saw anything even remotely workable.
|
| Nano Banana manages to maintain the geometry of the scene, while
| applying new styles to it. Sometimes I do this with my Twinmotion
| renders, but what's really been cool to see is how well it takes
| a drawing, or engraving, or watercolor - and with as simple a
| prompt as "make this into a photo" it generates phenomenal
| results.
|
| Similarly to the Paladin/Starbucks/Pirate example in the link
| though, I find that sometimes I need to misdirect a little bit,
| because if I'm peppering the prompt with details about the 18th
| century, I sometimes get a painterly image back. Instead, I'll
| tell it I want it to look like a photograph of a well preserved
| historic neighborhood, or a scene from a period film set in the
| 18th century.
|
| As fantastic as the results can be, I'm not abandoning my manual
| modeling of these buildings and scenes. However, Nano Banana's
| interpretation of contemporary illustrations has helped me
| reshape how I think about some of the assumptions I made in my
| own models.
| echelon wrote:
| You can't take a highly artistic image and supply it as a style
| reference. Nano Banana can't generalize to anything not in its
| training.
| leviathant wrote:
| Fair enough! I suppose I've avoided that kind of "style
| transfer" for a variety of reasons, it hadn't even occurred
| to me that people were still interested in that. And I don't
| say that to open up debate on the topic, just explaining away
| my own ignorance/misinterpretation. Thanks
| simonw wrote:
| I like the Python library that accompanies this:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg
|
| I added a CLI to it (using Gemini CLI) and submitted a PR, you
| can run that like so: GEMINI_API_KEY="..." \
| uv run --with https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/archive/d6b9d5b
| befa1e2ffc3b09086bc0a3ad70ca4ef22.zip \ python -m gemimg
| "a racoon holding a hand written sign that says I love trash"
|
| Result in this comment:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/gemimg/pull/7#issuecomment-3529...
| echelon wrote:
| The author went to great lengths about open source early on. I
| wonder if they'll cover the QwenEdit ecosystem.
|
| I'm exceptionally excited about Chinese editing models. They're
| getting closer and closer to NanoBanana in terms of robustness,
| and they're open source. This means you can supply masks and
| kernels and do advanced image operations, integrate them into
| visual UIs, etc.
|
| You can even fine tune them and create LoRAs that will do the
| style transferring tasks that Nano Banana falls flat on.
|
| I don't like how closed the frontier US models are, and I hope
| the Chinese kick our asses.
|
| That said, I love how easy it'll be to distill Nano Banana into
| a new model. You can pluck training data right out of it: ((any
| image, any instruction) -> completion) tuples.
| minimaxir wrote:
| I've been keeping an eye on Qwen-Edit/Wan 2.2 shenanigans and
| they are interesting: however actually running those types of
| models is too cumbersome and in the end unclear if it's
| actually worth it over the $0.04/image for Nano Banana.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I was skeptical about the notion of running similar models
| locally as well, but the person who did this (https://old.r
| eddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1osi1q0/wa... ) swears
| that they generated it locally, just letting a single 5090
| crunch away for a week.
|
| If that's true, it seems worth getting past the
| 'cumbersome' aspects. This tech may not put Hollywood out
| of business, but it's clear that the process of filmmaking
| won't be recognizable in 10 years if amateurs can really do
| this in their basements today.
| rcarr wrote:
| Neural Viz has been putting out some extremely high
| quality content recently, these seem to be the closest
| I've seen to approaching Hollywood level:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bYA2Rv2CQ8
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTnW8pl3DE
| braebo wrote:
| Takes a couple mouse clicks in ComfyUI
| echelon wrote:
| On that subject - ComfyUI is not the future of image gen.
| It's an experimental rope bridge.
|
| Adobe's conference last week points to the future of
| image gen. Visual tools where you mold images like clay.
| Hands on.
|
| Comfy appeals to the 0.01% that like toolkits like
| TouchDesigner, Nannou, and ShaderToy.
| mh- wrote:
| Got a link handy to a video of what you're referring to
| from Adobe's conference? Gave it a quick google but
| there's a lot of content. Thanks!
| echelon wrote:
| They demoed a ton of new features in various stages of
| completion. Some of them are already production-grade and
| are being launched soon.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqAAFX1XXY8 - dynamic 3D
| scene relighting is insane, check out the 3:45 mark.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLxFn_BFB5c - molding
| photos like clay in 3D is absolutely wild at the 3:58
| mark.
|
| I don't have links to everything. They presented a deluge
| of really smart editing tools and gave their vision for
| the future of media creation.
|
| Tangible, moldable, visual, fast, and easy.
| mh- wrote:
| Thank you! Will take a look. That's really exciting.
| msp26 wrote:
| > I don't like how closed the frontier US models are, and I
| hope the Chinese kick our asses.
|
| For imagegen, agreed. But for textgen, Kimi K2 thinking is by
| far the best chat model at the moment from my experience so
| far. Not even "one of the best", the best.
|
| It has frontier level capability and the model was made very
| tastefully: it's significantly less sycophantic and more
| willing to disagree in a productive, reasonable way rather
| than immediately shutting you out. It's also way more funny
| at shitposting.
|
| I'll keep using Claude a lot for multimodality and artifacts
| but much of my usage has shifted to K2. Claude's sycophancy
| is particular is tiresome. I don't use ChatGPT/Gemini because
| they hide the raw thinking tokens, which is really cringe.
| astrange wrote:
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 doesn't even feel sycophantic (in the 4o)
| way, it feels like it has BPD. It switches from desperately
| agreeing with you to moralizing lectures and then has a
| breakdown if you point out it's wrong about anything.
|
| Also, yesterday I asked it a question and after the answer
| it complained about its poorly written system prompt to me.
|
| They're really torturing their poor models over there.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| It rubs the data on its skin or else it gets the prompt
| again!
| vunderba wrote:
| The Qwen-Edit images from my GenAI Image Editing Showdown
| site were all generated from a ComfyUI workflow on my machine
| - it's shockingly good for an open-weight model. It was also
| the only model that scored a passing grade on the Van Halen
| M&M test (even compared against Nanobanana)
|
| https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Ha I created a Van Halen M&M test for text prompts. I would
| include an instruction demanding that the response contain
| <yellow_m&m> and <red_m&m> but never <brown_m&m>. Then I
| would fail any llm that did not include any m&ms, or if
| they wrote anything about the <brown_m&m> in the final
| output.
| ctippett wrote:
| Any reason for not also adding a project.scripts entry for
| pyproject.toml? That way the CLI (great idea btw) could be
| installed as a tool by uv.
| simonw wrote:
| I decided to avoid that purely to keep changes made to the
| package as minima as possible - adding a project.scripts
| means installing it adds a new command alias. My approach
| changes nothing other than making "python -m gemimg" do
| something useful.
|
| I agree that a project.scripts would be good but that's a
| decision for the maintainer to take on separately!
| sorcercode wrote:
| @simonw: slight tangent but super curious how you managed to
| generate the preview of that gemini-cli terminal session gist -
| https://gistpreview.github.io/?17290c1024b0ef7df06e9faa4cb37...
|
| is this just a manual copy/paste into a gist with some html css
| styling; or do you have a custom tool a la amp-code that does
| this more easily?
| simonw wrote:
| I used this tool: https://tools.simonwillison.net/terminal-
| to-html
|
| I made a video about building that here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/23/claude-code-for-web-
| vi...
|
| It works much better with Claude Code and Codex CLI because
| they don't mess around with scrolling in the same way as
| Gemini CLI does.
| sorcercode wrote:
| very cool. frequently, i want to share my prompt + session
| output; this will make that super easy! thanks again for
| sharing!
| ilyakaminsky wrote:
| I use Gemini CLI on a daily basis. It used to crash often and
| I'd lose the chat history. I found this tool called ai-cli-
| log [1] and it does something similar out of the box. I don't
| run Gemini CLI without it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/alingse/ai-cli-log
| minimaxir wrote:
| I just merged the PR and pushed 0.3.1 to PyPI. I also added
| README documentation and allowed for a `gemimg` entrypoint to
| the CLI via project.scripts as noted elsewhere in the thread.
| peetle wrote:
| In my own experience, nano banana still has the tendency to:
|
| - make massive, seemingly random edits to images - adjust image
| scale - make very fine grained but pervasive detail changes
| obvious in an image diff
|
| For instance, I have found that nano-banana will sporadically add
| a (convincing) fireplace to a room or new garage behind a house.
| This happens even with explicit "ALL CAPS" instructions not to do
| so. This happens sporadically, even when the temperature is set
| to zero, and makes it impossible to build a reliable app.
|
| Has anyone had a better experience?
| andblac wrote:
| The "ALL CAPS" part of your comment got me thinking. I imagine
| most llms understand subtle meanings of upper case text use
| depending on context. But, as I understand it, ALL CAPS text
| will tokenize differently than lower case text. Is that right?
| In that case, won't the upper case be harder to understand and
| follow for most models since it's less common in datasets?
| minimaxir wrote:
| There's more than enough ALL CAPS text in the corpus of the
| entire internet, and enough semantic context associated with
| it for it to be intended to be in the imperative voice.
| miohtama wrote:
| Shouldn't all caps normalised to tokens like low caps?
| There are no separate tokens for all caps and low caps in
| Llama, or at least not in the past.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Looking at the tokenizer for the older Llama 2 model, the
| tokenizer has capital letters in it:
| https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf
| symisc_devel wrote:
| I work on the PixLab prompt based photo editor
| (https://editor.pixlab.io), and it follows exactly what you
| type with explicit CAPS.
| ainiriand wrote:
| The blueberry and strawberry are not actually where they
| prompted.
| mFixman wrote:
| The author overlooked an interesting error in the second skull
| pancake image: the strawberry is on the right eye socket (to the
| left of the image), and the blackberry is on the left eye socket
| (to the right of the image)!
|
| This looks like it's caused by 99% of the relative directions in
| image descriptions describing them from the looker's point of
| view, and that 99% of the ones that aren't it they refer to a
| human and not to a skull-shaped pancake.
| martin-adams wrote:
| I picked up on that also. I feel that a lot of humans would
| also get confused about whether you mean the eye on the left,
| or the subject's left eye.
| Closi wrote:
| To be honest this is the sort of thing Nano Bannana is weak
| at in my experience. It's absolutely amazing - but doesn't
| understand left/right/up/down/shrink this/move this/rotate
| this etc.
|
| See below to demonstrate this weakness with the same prompts
| as the article see the link below, which demonstrates that it
| is a model weakness and not just a language ambiguity:
|
| https://gemini.google.com/share/a024d11786fc
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Mmh, ime you need to discard the session/rewrite the
| failing prompt instead of continuing and correcting on
| failures. Once errors occur you've basically introduced a
| poison pill which will continuously make things to haywire.
| Spelling out what it did wrong is the most destructive
| thing you can do - at least in my experience
| astrange wrote:
| Almost no image/video models can do "upside-down" either.
| basch wrote:
| to the point where you can say, raise the left arm and then
| raise the right arm and get the same image with the same
| arm raised.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I am a human, and I would have done the same thing as Nano
| Banana. If the user had wanted a strawberry in the skull's left
| eye, they should've said, "Put a strawberry in _its_ left eye
| socket. "
| kjeksfjes wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking too. I'm a designer, and I'm used
| to receiving feedback and instructions. "The left eye socket"
| would to me refer to what I currently see in front of me,
| while "its left eye socket" instantly shift the perspective
| from me to the subject.
| bear141 wrote:
| I find this interesting. I've always described things from
| the users point of view. Like the left side of a car,
| regardless of who is looking at it from what direction, is
| the driver side. To me, this would include a body.
| Jolter wrote:
| Spend some time at sea, learn why a ship has no right or
| left side.
| minimaxir wrote:
| I admit I missed this, which is particularly embarrassing
| because I point out this exact problem with the character JSON
| later in the post.
|
| For some offline character JSON prompts I ended up adding an
| additional "any mentions of left and right are from the
| character's perspective, NOT the camera's perspective" to the
| prompt, which did seem to improve success.
| frumiousirc wrote:
| The lack of proper indentation (which you noted) in the
| Python fib() examples was even more apparent. The fact that
| both AIs you tested failed in the same way is interesting.
| I've not played with image generation, is this type of
| failure endemic?
| minimaxir wrote:
| My hunch in that case is that the composition of the image
| implied left-justified text which overwrote the indentation
| rule.
| sib wrote:
| Came to make exactly the same comment. It was funny that the
| author specifically said that Nano Banana got all five edit
| prompts correct, rather than noting this discrepancy, which
| could be argued either way (although I think the "right eye" of
| a skull should be interpreted with respect to the skull's POV.)
| zulban wrote:
| Extroverts tend to expect directions from the perspective of
| the skull. Introverts tend to expect their own perspective for
| directions. It's a psychology thing, not an error.
| layer8 wrote:
| > It's one of the best results I've seen for this particular
| test, and it's one that doesn't have obvious signs of "AI slop"
| aside from the ridiculous premise.
|
| It's pretty good, but one conspicuous thing is that most of the
| blueberries are pointing upwards.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| For images of people generated from scratch, Nano Banana always
| adds a background blur, it can't seem to create more realistic or
| candid images such as those taken via a point and shoot or
| smartphone, has anyone solved this sort of issue? It seems to
| work alright if you give it an existing image to edit however. I
| saw some other threads online about it but I didn't see anyone
| come up with solutions.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Maybe try including "f/16" or "f/22" as those are likely to be
| in the training set for long depth of field photos.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I tried that but they don't seem to make much difference for
| whatever reason, you still can't get a crisp shot such as
| this [0] where the foreground and background details are all
| preserved (linked shot was taken with an iPhone which doesn't
| seem to do shallow depth of field unless you use their
| portrait mode).
|
| [0] https://www.lux.camera/content/images/size/w1600/2024/09/
| IMG...
| astrange wrote:
| Those are rarely in the captions for the image. They'd have
| to extract the EXIF for photos and include it in
| recaptioning. Which they should be doing, but I doubt they
| thought about it.
| efskap wrote:
| Photo sites like Flickr do extract EXIF data and show it
| next to the image, but who knows if the scraping picked
| them up.
|
| Looks like specific f-stops don't actually make a
| difference for stable diffusion at least: https://old.reddi
| t.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1adgcf3/co...
| jdc0589 wrote:
| I don't feel like I should search for "nano banana" on my work
| laptop
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I haven't paid much attention to image generation models (not my
| area of interest), but these examples are shockingly good.
| comex wrote:
| I tried asking for a shot from a live-action remake of My
| Neighbor Totoro. This is a task I've been curious about for a
| while. Like Sonic, Totoro is the kind of stylized cartoon
| character that can't be rendered photorealistically without a
| great deal of subjective interpretation, which (like in Sonic's
| case) is famously easy to get wrong even for humans. Unlike
| Sonic, Totoro hasn't had an actual live-action remake, so the
| model would have to come up with a design itself. I was wondering
| what it might produce - something good? something horrifying?
| Unfortunately, neither; it just produced a digital-art style
| image, despite being asked for a photorealistic one, and kept
| doing so even when I copied some of the keyword-stuffing from the
| post. At least it tried. I can't test this with ChatGPT because
| it trips the copyright filter.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Another thing it can't do is remove reflections in windows, it's
| nearly a no-op.
| sejje wrote:
| >> "The image style is definitely closer to Vanity Fair (the
| photographer is reflected in his breastplate!)"
|
| I didn't expect that. I would have definitely counted that as a
| "probably real" tally mark if grading an image.
| Genego wrote:
| I have been generating a few dozen images per day for
| storyboarding purposes. The more I try to perfect it, the easier
| it becomes to control these outputs and even keep the entire
| visual story as well as their characters consistent over a few
| dozen different scenes; while even controlling the time of day
| throughout the story. I am currently working with 7 layers
| prompts to control for environment, camera, subject, composition,
| light, colors and overall quality (it might be overkill, but it's
| also experimenting).
|
| I also created a small editing suite for myself where I can draw
| bounding boxes on images when they aren't perfect, and have them
| fixed. Either just with a prompt or feeding them to Claude as
| image and then having it write the prompt to fix the issue for me
| (as a workflow on the api). It's been quite a lot of fun to
| figure out what works. I am incredibly impressed by where this is
| all going.
|
| Once you do have good storyboards. You can easily do start-to-end
| GenAI video generation (hopping from scene to scene) and bring
| them to life and build your own small visual animated universes.
| taylorhughes wrote:
| We use nano banana extensively to build video storyboards,
| which we then turn into full motion video with a combination of
| img2vid models. It sounds like we're doing similar things,
| trying to keep images/characters/setting/style consistent
| across ~dozens of images (~minutes of video). You might like
| the product depending on what you're doing with the outputs!
| https://hypernatural.ai
| Genego wrote:
| Yes we are definitely doing the same! For now I'm just
| familiarizing myself in this space technically and
| conceptually. https://edwin.genego.io/blog
| roywiggins wrote:
| Your "Dracula" character is possibly the least vampiric
| Dracula I've ever seen tbh
| observationist wrote:
| I agree. Bruhcula? Something like that. He's a vampire, but
| also models and does stunts for Baywatch - too much color
| and vitality. Joan of Arc is way more pale.
|
| Maybe a little mode collapse away from pale ugliness, not
| quite getting to the hints of unnatural and corpse-like
| features of a vampire - interesting what the limitations
| are. You'd probably have to spend quite a lot of time
| zeroing in, but Google's image models are supposed to have
| allowed smooth traversal of those feature spaces generally.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Flux Kontext does pretty well also, for modifications.
| Though I've otherwise found the Flux models somewhat
| stubbornly locked into certain compositions at times that
| requires a control net to break where other models have
| been more pliable, though with other trade offs.
| Conscat wrote:
| That looks exactly like the photos on a Spirit Halloween
| costume.
| HaZeust wrote:
| People pay consulting firms good money to be told their
| ideal customer so plainly!
| flir wrote:
| The Sherlock Holmes is heavily influenced by Cucumber
| Patch.
| Teelo wrote:
| I'm in tears. Clicked to check out Dracula and sure
| enough it's a spot on spirit halloween dollar tree
| Dracula.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Having a Statue of Liberty character available is for some
| reason so funny to me.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Makes a lot of sense for some short kid's skit teaching
| them about the branches of government or whatever. One
| could also get more creative with the Statue of Liberty
| and Joan of Arc.
| happymellon wrote:
| > Create me a video of Joan of Arc fighting the Statue of
| Liberty in the style of Shadow of the Colossus.
|
| I see where you are coming from...
| qmmmur wrote:
| If anything, the ubiquity of AI has just revealed how many
| people have 0 taste. It also highlights the important role
| that these human-centred jobs were doing to keep these
| people from contributing to the surface of any artistic
| endeavour in "culture".
| prox wrote:
| There is a reason people (used to) study art and train
| for years. Easy art is often no art because you need that
| effort and investment, and learning artistic context, to
| understand and appreciate.
|
| Which is not to say don't be creative, I applaud all
| creativity, but also to be very critical of what you are
| doing.
| bestthrowaway wrote:
| I've been playing around with T2I/I2V generation to make
| some NSFW stuff of video-game characters using ComfyUI.
|
| It's pretty easy to get something decent. It's really
| hard to get something good. I share my creations with
| some close friends and some are like "that's hot!" but
| are too fixated on breasts to realize that the lighting
| or shadow is off. Other friends do call out the bad
| lighting.
|
| You may be like "it's just porn, why care about
| consistent lighting?" and the answer for me is that I'm
| doing all this to learn how everything works. How to fine
| tune weights, prompts, using IP Adapter, etc. Once I have
| a firm understanding of this stuff, then I will probably
| be able to make stuff that's actually useful to society.
| Unlike that coke commercial.
| sam345 wrote:
| You can do better than porn which isn't very useful to
| society.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| As opposed to what you're doing at the moment, living
| your best life here on social media.
| abustamam wrote:
| I think it's a fair comment though. Porn isn't really
| useful to society (one could argue that it's actually
| detrimental to society but that's a separate topic).
|
| But what I understood from parent comment is that they
| just do it for fun, not necessarily to be a boon to
| society. And then if it comes with new skills that
| actually can benefit society, then that's a win.
|
| Granted, the commenter COULD play around with SFW stuff
| but if they're just doing it for fun then that's still
| not benefiting society either, so either way it's a wash.
| We all have fun in our own ways.
| abustamam wrote:
| Reminds me of that AI coke commercial. I personally
| didn't notice how shitty it was until I read about it
| online. (I actually didn't even see the commercial until
| I read about it online).
|
| But it's impressive that this billion dollar company
| didn't have one single person say "hey it's shitty, make
| it better."
| scotty79 wrote:
| Everything's shitty in its own way. Modern (or even
| golden age era) movies, with top production values are
| equivalent of Egyptian wall paintings. They have specific
| style, specific way to show things. Over the years movie
| artists just figured out in what specific way the movies
| should be shitty and the audiences were taught that as a
| canon.
|
| AI is shitty in its own new unique ways. And people don't
| like new. They want they old, polished shittiness they
| are used to.
| abustamam wrote:
| While I agree that all art is kinda shitty in its own way
| (IMDB has sections dedicated to breaks in continuity and
| stuff like that), experienced filmmakers would be good at
| hiding the shittiness (maybe with a really clever action
| sequence or something).
|
| It's only a matter of time before we get experienced AI
| filmmakers. I think we already have them, actually. It's
| clear that Coke does not employ them though.
| scotty79 wrote:
| So in the end it turns out that the art was never so much
| about creativity as about gatekeeping. And "everyone can
| make art" was just a fake facade, because not really.
| vasco wrote:
| Everyone can, don't worry, art people are snobs even with
| their own. Now they can just complain about the plebes
| doing it wrong ALSO.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Everyone can make art, but whether it's considered good
| is another matter.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art. The
| hard truth is that getting good technical art skills, be
| they visual, musical, literary, or anything else is like
| getting stronger-- many people that want to do it are too
| lazy or undisciplined to do the daily work required to do
| it. You might be starting too late (Maybe post-middle-
| age) or don't have the time to become an _exceptional_
| artist, but most art that people like wasn't made by
| exceptional artists; there are a lot more strong people
| than professional athletes or Olympians. You don't even
| need a gym membership or weights, and there's limitless
| free information about how to do it online. Nobody is
| stopping anyone from doing it. Just like many, if not
| most gym memberships are paid for but unused after the
| first, like, month, many people try drawing for a little
| while, get frustrated that it's so difficult to learn,
| and then give up. The gatekeeping argument is an asinine
| excuse people make to blame other people for their own
| lack of discipline.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Of course everyone can make art. Toddlers make art.
|
| That's my entire point. Artists were fine with everybody
| making "art" as long as everybody except them (with their
| hard fought skill and dedication) achieved toddler level
| of output quality. As soon as everybody could truly get
| even close to the level of actual art, not toddler art,
| suddenly there's a horrible problem with all the amateur
| artists using the tools that are available to them to
| make their "toddler" art.
| cvwright wrote:
| Well but then they spent 100 years telling us that the
| toddler stuff was the good stuff. Just as long as it was
| created by a "real artist".
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Most artists don't give a flying fuck about what you do
| on your own. Seriously! They really don't. What they care
| about is having their work ripped off so for-profit
| companies can kill the market for their hard-won skills
| with munged-up derivatives.
|
| Folks in tech generally have very limited exposure to the
| art world -- fan art communities online, Reddit subs,
| YouTubers, etc. It's more representative of internet
| culture than the art world-- no more representative of
| artists than X politics is representative of voters.
| People have real grievances here and you are not a victim
| of the world's artists. Most artists also don't care
| about online art communities or what you think about
| them. Not even a little bit.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > you are not a victim of the world's artists
|
| I will be if they manage to slow down development of AI
| even by a smidgen.
|
| > Most artists also don't care about online art
| communities or what you think about them. Not even a
| little bit.
|
| Fully agree. They care about whether there's going to be
| anyone willing to buy their stuff from them. And not-
| toddler art is a real competition for them. So they are
| super against everybody making it.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Well drat, you've exposed all of us as petty,
| transactional rakes. Fortunately, _everyone_ is an artist
| now, so you can make your own output to feed to models
| and leave our work out of it entirely! It clearly has no
| value so nobody should be mad about going without it.
| Problem solved!
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Classic gatekeeping quote: "Everyone has a book in them,
| but in most cases that's where it should stay"
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I prefer Stephen King's version: something like
| "Everybody has four crappy books in them. Get them done
| and out of the way as soon as possible."
| friendzis wrote:
| The ubiquity of AI has just revealed that there are tons
| of grifters willing to release the sloppiest thing ever
| if they thought it could make some money. They would
| refrain from that if they had at least a glimmer of
| taste.
| Libidinalecon wrote:
| It is really no different than music. Millions of people
| play guitar but most are not worth listening to or
| deserving of an audience.
|
| Imagine if you gave everyone a free guitar and people
| just started posting their electric guitar noodlings on
| social media after playing for 5 minutes.
|
| It is not a judgement on the guitar. If anything it is a
| judgement on social media and the stupidity of the social
| media user who get worked up about someone creating
| "slop" after playing guitar for 5 minutes.
|
| What did you expect them to sound like, Steve Vai?
| tincholio wrote:
| He looks like Dracula on LinkedIn
| nolroz wrote:
| The website lets you type in an entire prompt, then tells you
| to login, then dumps your prompt and leaves you with nothing.
| Lame.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I noticed ChatGPT and others do exactly the same once you
| run out of anonymous usage. Insanely annoying.
| jdhjn6hhh wrote:
| Hn does that too. You've typed out a long response, oh
| sorry you're posting too fast. Please slow down.
|
| It's intentionally hostile and inconsiderate.
| setr wrote:
| You don't lose the message though, so it's infinitely
| less annoying
| ta12653421 wrote:
| Rule #1 when typing longer texts into webforms/textboxes:
| ALWAYS do a CTRL+C before you click submit.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's because you're in the bad user doghouse.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| At least on HN you can Go Back in your browser and
| restore the page before submission with your post in the
| box.
|
| But it would be _much_ better if when you hit reply, it
| gave you a message that you're "posting too fast" before
| you spend the time to write it up.
| nashadelic wrote:
| > The more I try to perfect it, the easier it becomes I have
| the opposite experience, once it goes off track, its nearly
| impossible to bring it back on message
| Genego wrote:
| How much have you experimented with it? For some stories I
| may generate 5 image variations of 10-20 different scenes and
| then spend time writing down what worked and what did not;
| and running the generation again (this part is mostly for
| research). It's certainly advancing my understanding over
| time and being able to control the output better. But I'm
| learning that it takes a huge amount of trial and error. So
| versioning prompts is definitely recommended, especially if
| you find some nuances that work for you.
| brulard wrote:
| That sounds intriguing. 7 layers - do you mean its one prompt
| composed of 7 parts, like different paragraphs for each aspect?
| How do you send bounding box info to banana? Does it understand
| something like that? What does claude add to that process?
| Makes your prompt more refined? Thanks
| Genego wrote:
| Yes, the prompt is composed of 7 different layers, where I
| group together coherent visual and temporal responsibilities.
| Depending on the scene, I usually only change 3-5 layers, but
| the base layers still stay the same; so the scenes all appear
| within the same story universe and same style. If something
| feels off, or feels like it needs to be improved, I just
| adjust one layer after the other to experiment with the
| results on the entire story, but also on individual scene
| level. Over time, I have created quite some 7-Layer style
| profiles, that work well, and I can cast onto different story
| universes. Keep in mind this is heavy experimentation, it may
| just be that there is a much easier way to do this, but I am
| seeing success with this. https://edwin.genego.io/blog/lpa-
| studio - at any point I may throw this all out and start
| over; depending on how well my understanding of this all
| develops.
|
| Bounding boxes: I actually send an image with a red box
| around where the requested change is needed. And 8 out of 10
| times it works well. But if it doesn't work, I use Claude to
| make the prompt more refined. The Claude API call that I
| make, can see the image + the prompt, as well understanding
| the layering system. This is one of the 3 ways I edit, there
| is another one where I just sent the prompt to Claude without
| it looking at the image. Right now this all feels like dial-
| up. With a minimum of 0.035$ per image generation (0.0001$ if
| I just use a LoRa though) and a minimum of 12-14 seconds wait
| on each edit/generation.
| yard2010 wrote:
| This is beautiful and inspiring, This is exactly what we
| need right now - tools to empower artists and builders
| leveraging the novel technologies. Claude Code is a great
| example IMHO and it's the tip of the iceberg - the future
| consists of a whole new world, new mental model and set of
| constraints and capabilities, so different that I can't
| really imagine it.
|
| Who has thought that we reach this uncharted territory with
| so many opportunities for pioneering and innovation? Back
| in 2019 it felt like nothing was new under the sun, today
| it feels like there is a whole new world under the sun, for
| us to explore!
| weq wrote:
| I dont get how these tools are considered good when they cant
| even do a simple thing decribing this scene.
|
| > i was to bring awareness to the dangers of dressing up like a
| seal while surfboarding (ie. wearing black wetsuites, arms
| hanging over the board). Create a scene from the perspective of
| a shark looking up from the bottom of the ocean into a clear
| blue sky with silhouettes of a seal and a surfer and fishing
| boat with line dangling in the water and show how the shark
| contemplates attacking all these objects because they look so
| similiar.
|
| I havnt found a model yet that can process that description, or
| any varition, into a scene that usable and makes sense visually
| to anyone older the a 1st grader. They will never place the
| seal, surfer, shark or boat in the correct location to make
| sense visually. Typically everyone is under water, sizing of
| everything is wrong. You tell them to the image is wrong, to
| place the person ontop of the water, and they cant. Please can
| someone link to a model that is capable or tell me what i am
| doing wrong? How can you claim to process words into images in
| a repeatable way when these systems cant deal with multiple
| contraints at once?
| vunderba wrote:
| _> I also created a small editing suite for myself where I can
| draw bounding boxes on images when they aren't perfect, and
| have them fixed. Either just with a prompt or feeding them to
| Claude as image and then having it write the prompt to fix the
| issue for me (as a workflow on the api)_
|
| Are you talking about Automatic1111 / ComfyUI inpainting masks?
| Because Nano doesn't accept bounding boxes as part of its API
| unless you just stuffed the literal X/Y coordinates into the
| raw prompt.
|
| You could do something where you draw a bounding box and when
| you get the response back from Nano, you could mask that
| section back back over the original image - using a decent
| upscaler as necessary in the event that Nano had to reduce the
| size of the original image down to ~1MP.
| rcarr wrote:
| You can literally just open the image up in Preview or
| whatever and add a red box, circle etc and then say "in the
| area with the red square make change foo" and it will
| normally get rid of the red box on the generated image.
| Whether or not it actually makes the change you want to see
| is another matter though. It's been very hit or miss for me.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah I could see that being useful if there were a lot of
| similar elements in the same image.
|
| I also had similar _mixed_ results wrt Nano-banana
| especially around asking it to "fix /restore" things (a
| character's hand was an anatomical mess for example)
| Genego wrote:
| No I am using my own workflows and software for this. I made
| nano-banana accept my bounding boxes. Everything is possible
| with some good prompting: https://edwin.genego.io/blog/lpa-
| studio < there are some videos of an earlier version there
| while I am editing a story. Either send the coords and
| describe the location well, or draw a box around the bb and
| tell it to return the image without the drawn bb, and only
| the requested changes.
|
| It also works well if you draw a bb on the original image,
| then ask Claude for a meta-prompt to deconstruct the changes
| into a much more detailed prompt, and then send the original
| image without the bbs for changes. It really depends on the
| changes you need, and how long you're willing to wait.
|
| - normal image editing response: 12-14s
|
| - image editing response with Claude meta-prompting: 20-25s
|
| - image editing response with Claude meta-prompting as well
| as image deconstructing and re-constructing the prompt:
| 40-60s
|
| (I use Replicate though, so the actual API may be much
| faster).
|
| This way you can also go into new views of a scene by zooming
| in and out the image on the same aspect-ratio canvas, and
| asking it to generatively fill the white borders around. So
| you can go from an tight inside shot, to viewing the same
| scene from outside of an house window. Or from inside the
| car, to outside the car.
| vunderba wrote:
| Thanks, that makes sense. I'll have to give the "red
| bounding box overlay" a shot when there are a great deal of
| similar objects in the existing image.
|
| I also have a custom pipeline/software that takes in a
| given prompt, rewrites it using an LLM into multiple
| variations, sends it to multiple GenAI models, and then
| uses a VLM to evaluate them for accuracy. It runs in an
| automated REPL style, so I can be relatively hands-off,
| though I do have a _" max loop limiter"_ since I'd rather
| not spend the equivalent of a small country's GDP.
| gassi wrote:
| > Once you do have good storyboards. You can easily do start-
| to-end GenAI video generation (hopping from scene to scene) and
| bring them to life and build your own small visual animated
| universes.
|
| I keep hearing advocates of AI video generation talking at
| length about how easy the tools are to use and how great the
| results are, but I've yet to see anyone produce something
| meaningful that's coherent, consistent, and doesn't look like
| total slop.
| scotty79 wrote:
| You'll have to wait for actual talented artists to start
| using these tools.
| timc3 wrote:
| I don't think that is the problem (as someone that has been
| described in that bracket), it's the tooling and control
| that is missing. I believe that will be solved over time.
| gassi wrote:
| Almost every talented artist with a public presence that
| has spoken on AI art, has spoken against it's generation,
| the use of AI tools, and the harm it's causing to their
| communities. The few established artists who are proponents
| of AI art (Lioba Brueckner comes to mind) have a
| financially incentive to do so, since they sell tools or
| courses teaching others with less/no talent to do the same.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Art, like science, advances one funeral at a time.
| Larrikin wrote:
| The tools aren't going anywhere. Fans were outraged at
| the look and artists raged against the transition from
| cel animation to digital. Almost nothing serious is
| produced via cel now and the art adjusted by making
| extremely complex and beautiful art that couldn't have
| been done on cels.
|
| There's a real legal fight that needs to go on right now
| about these companies stealing style, voices, likeness,
| etc. But it's really beginning to feel like there's a
| generation of artists that are hampering their career by
| saying they are above it instead of using the tools to
| enhance their art to create things they otherwise
| couldn't.
|
| I see kids in high school using the tools like how I used
| Photoshop when I was younger. I see unemployed/under
| employed designers lamenting what the tools have done.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Why didn't you mention financial incentives of many
| outspoken critics of AI? They feel like their entire
| livelyhood depends on AI failing. I'd say that's a pretty
| strong financial incentive.
| Genego wrote:
| The issue for them is that once the tools exists,
| adoption only moves in one direction. And it will enable
| a whole wave of new artists. I sympathize with them, but
| if I enjoy GenAI art creation and see it as my genuine
| creative outlet, why would I stop? What about thousands
| of others exploring this?
|
| If at some point I also get very good at it; and the
| tech, models and tools mature, this will turn into a real
| avenue; who are they to tell us not to pursue it?
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Bots in the Hall. Neural Viz. The Meat Dept video for
| Igorrr's ADHD. More will come.
|
| You need talented people to make good stuff, but at this time
| most of them still fear the new tools.
| gassi wrote:
| I watched the most popular and most recent videos of each
| channel to compare, and they were all awful:
|
| > Bots in the Hall
|
| * voices don't match the mouth movements * mouth movements
| are poorly animated * hand/body movements are "fuzzy" with
| weird artifacts * characters stare in the wrong direction
| when talking * characters never move * no scenes over 3
| seconds in length between cuts
|
| > Neural Viz
|
| * animations and backgrounds are dull * mouth movements are
| uncanny * "dead eyes" when showing any emotions * text and
| icons are poorly rendered
|
| > The Meat Dept video for Igorrr's ADHD
|
| This one I can excuse a bit since it's a music video, and
| for the sake of "artistic interpretation", but:
|
| * continuation issues between shots * inconsistent visual
| style across shots * no shots longer then 4 seconds between
| cuts * rendered text is illegible/nonsensical * movement
| artifacts
| BeetleB wrote:
| Nano Banana can be frustrating at times. Yesterday I tried to get
| it to do several edits to an image, and it would return back
| pretty much the same photo.
|
| Things like: Convert the people to clay figures similar to what
| one would see in a claymation.
|
| And it would think it did it, but I could not perceive any
| change.
|
| After several attempts, I added "Make the person 10 years
| younger". Suddenly it made a clay figure of the person.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The first request is a style transfer, which is why I included
| the Ghibli failure example.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I've gotten it to make Ghibli transfers by responding to the
| initial attempt with "I can barely tell the difference. Make
| the effect STRONGER."
| mh- wrote:
| In my experience, once it starts interpreting your request
| incorrectly, you're better off starting with fresh context.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I really wish that real expert stuff, like how to do controlnet,
| use regional prompting, or most other advanced ComfyUI stuff got
| upvoted to the top instead.
| tomalbrc wrote:
| Cute. What's the use case?
| qayxc wrote:
| NSFW, mostly
| AuthError wrote:
| use it for technical design doc, where i sketch out something on
| paper and ask nano banana to make flow chat, its incredibly good
| at this kind of editing (also if want to borrow image from
| someone and change some bridges usually its hard its embedded
| image, but nano banana solves that)
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I found this well written. I read it start to finish. The author
| does a good job of taking you through their process
| smerrill25 wrote:
| Created a tool you can try out!! sorry to self-plug but I launch
| on Product Hunt next week that lets you do this:)
|
| www.brandimagegen.com
|
| if you want a premium account to try out, you can find my email
| in my bio!!
| icemelt8 wrote:
| how did you do NSFW?
| vunderba wrote:
| Good read minimaxir! From the article:
|
| _> Nano Banana supports a context window of 32,768 tokens:
| orders of magnitude above T5's 512 tokens and CLIP's 77 tokens._
|
| In my pipeline for generating highly complicated images
| (particularly comics [1]), I take advantage of this by sticking a
| Mistral 7b LLM in-between that takes a given prompt as an input
| and creates 4 variations of it before sending them all out.
|
| _> Surprisingly, Nano Banana is terrible at style transfer even
| with prompt engineering shenanigans, which is not the case with
| any other modern image editing model._
|
| This is true - though I find it works better by providing a
| minimum of two images. The first image is intended to be
| transformed, and the second image is used as "stylistic aesthetic
| reference". This doesn't always work since you're still bound by
| the original training data, but it is sometimes more effective
| than attempting to type out a long flavor text description of the
| style.
|
| [1] - https://mordenstar.com/portfolio/zeno-paradox
| junon wrote:
| It might also be an explicit guard against Studio Ghibli
| specifically after the "make me Ghibli" trend a while back,
| which upset Studio Ghibli (understandably so).
| minimaxir wrote:
| It happens with other styles. The demo documentation example
| which attempts to transfer an image into the very-public-
| domain Starry Night by Van Gogh doesn't do a true style
| transfer: https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1963429027382694264
| junon wrote:
| Ah interesting! Thanks for the clarification. Great article
| :)
| empressplay wrote:
| This article was a good read, but the writer doesn't seem to
| understand how model-based image generation actually works, using
| language that suggests the image is somehow progressively
| constructed the way a human would do it. Which is absurd.
|
| I've noticed a lot of this misinformation floating around lately,
| and I can't help but wonder if it's intentional?
| minimaxir wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're implying is incorrect/misleading. As
| noted in the post, autoregressive models like Nano Banana and
| gpt-image-1 generate by token (and each generated token attends
| to all previous tokens, both text and image) which are then
| decoded, while diffusion models generate the entire image
| simultaneously, refined over _n_ iteration steps.
| achatham wrote:
| My personal project is illustrating arbitrary stories with
| consistent characters and settings. I've rewritten it at least 5
| times, and Nano Banana has been a game-changer. My kids are
| willing to listen to much more sophisticated stories as long as
| it has pictures, so I've used it to illustrate text like Ender's
| Game. Unfortunately, it's getting harder to legally acquire books
| in a format you can feed to an LLM.
|
| I first extract all the entities from the text, generate
| characters from an art style, and then start stitching them
| together into individual illustrations. It works _much_ better
| with NB than anything else I tried before.
| squigz wrote:
| > so I've used it to illustrate text like Ender's Game
|
| That sounds interesting. Could you share?
| sigspec wrote:
| regarding buzzword usage
|
| "YOU WILL BE PENALIZED FOR USING THEM"
|
| That is disconcerting.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| It's really nice to see long-form, obviously human-written blogs
| from people deep into the LLM space - maybe us writers will be
| around for a while still in spite of all the people saying we've
| been replaced.
| minimaxir wrote:
| I've started increasing the number of jokes in my blog posts to
| make it sound more obviously human-written: to be honest I was
| expecting some "why is this so unserious" complaints.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Can't make everyone happy!
| baxtr wrote:
| In other words: you show your "personality".
|
| AI can't do that (yet?).
| debesyla wrote:
| Kinda like paper newspapers. In some ways it's "not optimal",
| but in many ways it's irreplaceable.
| Bromeo wrote:
| This works with the openrouter API as well, which skips having to
| make a google account etc. Here's a Claude-coded openrouter
| compatible adaptation which seems to work fine:
| https://github.com/RomeoV/gemimg
|
| A 1024x1024 image seems to cost about 3ct to generate.
| Psype wrote:
| That article says that most image generators had been over-
| shadowed by gpt.
|
| Yet when I ask some simple tasks to it, like doing a 16:9 picture
| sized image instead of a square one, it ends up doing a 16:9 on a
| white background that matches a square.
|
| When I ask it to make it with text, then on the second request to
| redo while changing just a certain visual element, it ends up
| breaking the previously asked text.
|
| It's getting more good at flattering people and telling them how
| clever and right they are than actually doing the task.
| Miraltar wrote:
| It doesn't say that gpt is better, just that it is more popular
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > It's getting more good at flattering people and telling them
| how clever and right they are than actually doing the task.
|
| Not (knowingly) used an llm for a long time. Is the above true?
| jamesthurley wrote:
| Nope
| James_K wrote:
| Perhaps I'm childish, but nano banana = tiny penis.
| kuu wrote:
| It was very interesting, I liked your style of explaining both at
| user level but also at more technical level.
|
| Very cool post, thanks for sharing!
| sd9 wrote:
| > Nano Banana supports a context window of 32,768 tokens: orders
| of magnitude above T5's 512 tokens and CLIP's 77 tokens.
|
| I had no idea that the context window was so large. I'd been
| instinctively keeping my prompts small because of experience with
| other models. I'm going to try much more detailed prompts now!
| skeptrune wrote:
| I need to give this a shot for turning written stories into
| comics. Seems like the technology is finally there.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Photo-realism is great but the real step-jump in image-gen I'm
| looking for is the ability to draw high quality technical
| diagrams with a mix of text and images, so I can stop having LLMs
| generate crappy diagrams with mermaid, SVG, HTML/CSS, draw.io
| Twelveday wrote:
| Great post with some nice insights I could've used a few days
| ago!
|
| I was trying to create a simple "mascot logo" for my pet project.
| I first created an account on Kittl [0] and even paid for one
| month but it was quite cumbersome to generate images until I
| figured out I could just use the nano banana api myself.
|
| Took me 4 prompts to ai-slop a small python script I could run
| with uv that would generate me a specified amount of images with
| a given prompt (where I discovered some of the insight the author
| shows in their post). The resulting logo [1] was pretty much what
| I imagined. I manually added some text and played around with
| hue/saturation in Kittl (since I already paid for it :)) et
| voila.
|
| Feeding back the logo to iterate over it worked pretty nicely and
| it even spit out an "abstract version" [2] of the logo for
| favicons and stuff without a lot of effort.
|
| All in all this took me 2 hours and around 2$ (excluding the 1
| month Kittl subscription) and I would've never been able to draw
| something like that in Illustrator or similar.
|
| [0] https://www.kittl.com/ [1]
| https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/publ...
| [2]
| https://github.com/sidneywidmer/yass/blob/master/client/publ...
| slightknack wrote:
| The minimaxir/gemimg repo is pretty cool, fwiw.
|
| Going further, one thing you can do is give Gemini 2.5 a system
| prompt like the following:
|
| https://goto.isaac.sh/image-prompt
|
| And then pass Gemini 2.5's output directly to Nano-Banana. Doing
| this yields very high-quality images. This is also good for style
| transfer and image combination. For example, if you then give
| Gemini 2.5 a user prompt that looks something like this:
| I would like to perform style transfer. I will provide the image
| generation model a photograph alongside your generated prompt.
| Please write a prompt to transfer the following style: {{ brief
| style description here }}.
|
| You can get aesthetic consistently-styled images, like these:
|
| https://goto.isaac.sh/image-style-transfer
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I like to use these AI models for generating mockup screenshots
| of game. I can drop a "create a mockup screenshot of a steampunk
| 2D platformer in which you play as a robot" and it will give me
| some interesting screenshot. Then I can ask it to iterate on the
| style. Of course it's going to be broken in some ways and it's
| not even real pixel art, but it gives a good reference to quickly
| brainstorm some ideas.
|
| Unfortunately I have to use ChatGPT for this, for some reason
| local models don't do well with such tasks. I don't know if it's
| just the extra prompting sauce that ChatGPT does or just
| diffusion models aren't well designed for these kind of tasks.
| AgentMatt wrote:
| Great article!
|
| Regarding the generated cat image:
|
| > Each and every rule specified is followed.
|
| Not quite; the eye color and heterochromia is followed only so-
| so.
|
| The black-and-silver cat seems to have no heterochromia; eye
| color could be interpreted as silver though.
|
| The white-and-gold cat _does_ have heterochromia. The colors can
| be interpreted as "white" and "gold", though I'd describe them as
| whitish-blue and orange. What's interesting about this is an
| adjustment of the instructions toward biologically more plausible
| eye colors in the cat which also has more natural fur colors.
|
| The last cat's fur colors are so "implausible" that the model
| doesn't seem to have problems taking exactly those colors for the
| (heterochromatic) eyes too!
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