Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
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1. The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important. The most successful artists are ones that craft a story around their life and art, and don't just create stuff and stop. This will become even more important.
2. Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist. But they aren't alive, they don't live in the world and have experiences, and they can't create something truly new.
3. Those that bother to learn the actual art skills, and not merely prompting, will increasingly be miles ahead of everyone else. People are lazy, and bothering to put in the time to actually learn stuff will stand out more and more. (Ditto for writing essays and other writing people are doing with AI.)
4. Taste continues to be the single most important thing. The vast, vast majority of AI art out there is...not very good. It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
5. Art with physical materials will become increasingly popular. That is, stuff that can't be digitized very well: sculpture, installation art, etc. Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form. This uncoolness will push people away from the screen and towards things that are more material.
> 1... The narrative/life of the artist becomes a lot more important.
When I watch a movie, I don't care about the artist's life. I care about character life, that's very different.
> 2... Originality matters more than ever. By design, these tools can only copy and mix things that already exist.
It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.
> 4... It's not going to get better, because the lack of taste isn't a technical problem.
Engineers are in business of converting non-technical problems into technical ones. Just like AI now is way more capable than it was 20 years ago, and able to write interesting texts and make interesting pictures - something which at the time wasn't considered a technical problem - with time what we perceive as "taste" may likely improve.
> 5... Above all, AI art is uncool, which means it has no real future as a leading art form.
AI critics are for a long time mistaking the level with trend. Or, giving a comparison with SpaceX achievements, "you're currently here" - when there was a list of "first, get to the orbit, then we'll talk", "first, start regular payload deliveries to orbit, then we'll talk", "first, land the stage... send crewed capsule... do that in numbers..." and then, currently "first, send the Starship to orbit". "You're currently here" is the always existing point which isn't achieved at the moment and which gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
You assume AI won't be able to make cool art with time. AI critics were shown time and time again to be underestimating the possibilities. Some people find it hard to learn in some particular topics.
I’m fairly certain the original comment was referring to instances where the artist is the character/primary subject.
But even then – people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor. People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
A technical company like Space X really has nothing to do with this conversation, and I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it. What AI tool is a living being interacting with the world? None, of course. Hence the constant generic slop images of Impressionism or some other already-existing art style.
Just look at the images in the link: this is the best they can do? A kangaroo at a cafe in Paris? Could anything be more devoid of good taste?
There was a study around this exact thing:
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-gauges-h...
And we have AI generated influencers now, ex. https://www.instagram.com/imma.gram, so why wouldn't people care about an AI the same way they do about people they never meet?
I suspect here we have underlying disagreement regarding assumption that AI - in general, not necessarily today's models - isn't qualitatively different than human mind. The part "Originality comes from humans experiencing the world and interacting with it" isn't an accepted truth, and even today AIs do interact, in a limited sense, with the world - so "None, of course" is questionable. And even if so, concluding "Hence... slop..." seems like a jump in reasoning. For example, why don't you think this slop is more like child's early paintings? Just because today's AIs have limited means to learn in the process?
> I think you missed my point about it being uncool. It’s not about critics, it’s about culture at large.
What it is about culture at large? SpaceX analogy was brought to illustrate how much arguments about AI incapabilities are applicable today, but not necessarily tomorrow - just like arguments about SpaceX inability to reach a particular goal quite a few times turned out to be a matter of - not so long - time.
I agree that many AI results today can be uncool. But how do you know it's not passing the uncanny valley period? How can you know they can't be cool eventually?
> people obviously go watch movies because they like the actor/director involved. It’s not really clear why anyone would care about an AI actor.
Let me stretch a little to illustrate here. Imagine "personal" experiences of AI - making AIs unique. One of those AIs consistently produces good movies, which, if you're honestly don't judge by the authorship - are actually good. Yes, people may not care about non-existent AI actors, but they may still care about existent AI author :) . Do you think it's impossible?
> People want to watch people, not imitations of them.
How can you tell the difference? You're watching a movie with actors who are not familiar to you. Would you refuse to watch just for this reason? You just came to somebody's party, and here's a movie going on, and you watched it to the end, because it looked interesting, and you don't know anything about producers, actors etc. - you still can talk about the movie, will you be predominantly worried that it's "AI slop" even if it looks great? Suspiciously great maybe?
> The rest of your comments seem to be summarized as “it has gotten better and therefore it will eventually solve all problems it has now.” Which may be true in a technical sense, but again this is not taste.
It's hard to define taste, to be honest. People can definitely have different tastes, almost by definition. But more importantly - why do you think AI products may not have tastes?
> At this point I think identifying a work as AI-created makes people instantly devalue it. We are rapidly approaching the point where no one wants to admit something is AI-created, because it comes with negative perceptions.
Yes. But doesn't it look like a prejudice? Of course we can point to how many times we looked at it and didn't get some perceived value out of the work, and got annoyed that we spent time and efforts, but didn't get some results - but what if we'll mostly get results from AI works? Do you think that's impossible?
Because it can't feel. Get used to it. It can't feel, and what ever it comes up with, would be an imitation of someone real who can feel. So it can generate stuff that can cater to a taste, but the thing itself can't have tasts.
It is fundamental. Arguing about it all day wont change it.
This was always the case. Without an idea of what it is, no sound wave is going to register to a human as music. If you heard a violin for the first time and had no idea what it was, maybe you'd like the sound, maybe not, if you weren't used to it you might make up a theory of what it is and be fascinated by it.
But these days, if you hear something that sounds different, of course you will likely just assume oh, some AI made it, and that theory makes it less interesting, because then it makes no sense wondering what the person on the other side is trying to communicate, because there is no person on the other side.
Of course you can still be interested in for other reasons. Like you'd be interested, on seeing a bowed string, "how does it make a sound like that?" You might even find the sound enjoyable in itself, because of associations you for some reason get from it. But no sound is terribly enjoyable for long if it isn't interesting.
Art is not a problem to be solved.
First, "AI is thereby incapable" is a hypothesis, not a fact - how would you prove that you have to "live" to produce art? You might feel this way, you may suggest some correlations here - but can you really prove that?
Second, I don't see impossibility for AI to be - to various degrees - an agent to the world. I think that's already happening actually - they are interacting with world even today, in some limited sense, through our computers and networks, and - today - not many of them actually "learn" from those interactions. But we're in the early days of this - I suspect.
With how much data goes into the frontier systems, and how much of it gets captured by them, an AI might have, in many ways, a richer grasp of human experience than the humans themselves do.
You were only ever one human. An LLM has skimmed from millions. You have seen a tree, and the AI has seen the forest it stands in.
Humans do that a lot but it's not all we do. Go to a museum that has modern(ish) art. It's pretty incredibly how diverse the styles and ideas are. Of course it's not representative of anything. These works were collected and curated exactly because they are not average. But it's still something that humans made.
I think what people can do is have conceptual ideas and then follow the "logic" of those ideas to places they themselves have never seen or expected. Artists can observe patterns, ask how they work and why they have the effect they do and then deliberately break them.
I'm not sure current genAI models do these sorts of things.
You might be right here. Two points though - first, we don't know if current AI is actually incapable of something in particular; we didn't find this, didn't prove it. Second, we might have a different AI approach, which would actually be capable of these things you mention. To me, it's way too early to dismiss AIs - at least in principle - regarding all of this.
In a hypothetical world of "AI can produce a lot of extremely high quality art", you can easily find (or commission) AI art you would absolutely love. But it probably wouldn't be something that anyone else would find a lot of value in?
There will be no AI-generated Titanic. There will be many AI-generated movies that are as good as Titanic, but none will become as popular as Titanic did.
Because when AI has won art on quality and quantity both, and the quality of the work itself is no longer a differentiator against the sea of other high quality works? The "narrative/life of the artist" is a fallback path to popularity. You will need something that's not just "it's damn good art" - an external factor - to make it impactful, make it stick in the culture field.
Already a thing in many areas where the supply of art outpaces demand. Pop music, for example, is often as much about making sound as it is about manufacturing narratives around the artists. K-pop being an extreme version of the latter lean.
I begrudgingly have to admit it is a very good movie
If someone makes a dumb video that they got an AI to make of a panda surfing on mac and cheese, giggles and deletes it, that’s maybe good art? I don’t know. The scale they are able to produce stuff is unbelievable and changes a lot of assumptions you make about the way that world works.
The future isn’t watching TV, it’s talking to your tv show while it is created in real time based on your feedback.
Every human being is unique, both biologically and experientially. Until an AI can feel and have a lived experience, it can not create art.
At least in popular, mainstream culture, the viewer is heavily invested in the identity of the artist. The quality of the "art" is secondary. That's how we get music engineered by committee. And it's how we get paparazzi, People Magazine, and so forth.
On the other hand, this isn't anything new at all. We've had this kind of thing for decades. Real art still manages to survive at the margins.
When I buy art, I have often spoken with the artist in the past couple days, or I am aware of their history and story and how they developed their art as a response to some other movement or artist collective.
It's rare for people to buy art just bc oil paints go brrrrrm
It is rare to buy oil paints period. It is an expensive luxury in more than one way.
That being said I do buy art hanging from the wall because it looks pretty. In fact that is the only way i ever did. I see it. I feel it. I say “hi, hello, how much? That sounds good, here you go. Yes please package it.” And then i hang it on my wall. Don’t care about who the artist is and couldn’t tell you.
I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
We will only prove humans are not.
The best time to start paying attention was ten years ago, when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." I sure wish I had.
The next best time to start paying attention is now.
A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?
>>I sure wish I had.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.
I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.
As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.
Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.
...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
Idiot savants are still idiots even though they are exceptional at some things. A person powered by an LLM and no human intelligence would absolutely be classified as an idiot savant.
For that matter — you might be talking to one now!
Does it mean that researchers wasted their time on useless dead end architectures, or are they ahead of the curve and commercial companies are slow to adopt them?
Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
I don't quite follow. Are you saying researchers are wasting their time working with transformer networks now, or that they wasted too much time in the past, or...?
Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
What did you expect, exactly? I don't know about you, but I bought my GPU to play games, and now it's finding bugs in my C code, writing better code to replace it, and checking it into Github. That doesn't signal "primitive" to me. More like straight outta Roswell.
Never mind that you need to learn about the god of the gaps. But what you’re doing here isn’t even relevant to GPs main point.
How would you prove if it did? What kind of proof would you accept?
Concretely, that means: We already have indirect evidence: conscious states vary predictably with brain states. Damage specific regions, lose specific functions. Alter chemistry, alter experience. This is not proof, but it’s systematic dependence, which is exactly what emergence predicts. Stronger evidence would look like precise, bidirectional mappings between neural activity and reported experience: to the point where you could reliably read subjective states from brain data, or induce specific experiences through targeted stimulation. We’re already moving in that direction.
The hardest bar would be building a system from physical components, having it report coherent subjective experience, and being able to explain why that configuration produces experience while others don’t. That’s the hard problem: and no, we’re not there yet. And it’s worth being honest: we’ve been assuming physicalism will eventually solve it, but there’s no guarantee that’s true rather than hopeful. The fact that brain states correlate with conscious states doesn’t explain why there is something it is like to have those states. Correlation is not mechanism.
But here’s the key point: you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets. We don’t have that standard of proof for evolution, gravity, or quantum mechanics either. We have overwhelming evidence that makes alternatives implausible.
So the question isn’t “can you prove it beyond all doubt?” It’s “does the evidence favor it over alternatives?” Right now, it does — but that’s a pragmatic verdict, not a metaphysical one. Idealist frameworks like Kastrup’s or Faggin’s remain serious contenders. The debate is more open than mainstream science often admits.
So like if i finetune an LLM in a loop to tell you that it is feeling a coherent subjective experience would you accept that?
Does that mean that no dog has ever been conscious, because they cannot report a coherent subjective experience? (Because they can’t report anything at all. Being non-verbal.)
> you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets.
Wtf? I asked what kind of proof would you accept. How is that holding anyone to any kind of standard? Let alone one which is too high.
Better criterion: a system whose overall architecture and behavior is consistent with experience, not just one that says the right words.
On the standard of proof: that was a rhetorical deflection and you’re right to call it out. You asked a genuine question and got it turned back on you. And you’re pointing at something real: in science, strong correlation is not accepted as proof when stricter evidence is achievable. The reason we settle for correlation here isn’t because it’s sufficient, it’s because subjective experience may make stronger proof structurally inaccessible. But it’s also worth noting that scientific consensus has a poor track record of admitting this honestly. Dominant paradigms tend to defend themselves long past the point where the cracks are visible, physicalism on consciousness is no exception. The confidence with which emergence is presented often reflects institutional momentum as much as evidence.
It's not divine, just expensive, and has to pay its costs. That little thing - cost - powers evolution. Cost defines what can exist and shaped us into our current form, it is the recursive runway of life.
This is a very, very weak criterion for divinity. If this is truly it, we should prepare with great haste for the arrival of our artificial gods.
Because by this (IMO silly) metric it seems they will be more divine than us.
When I see an early realistic painting, I'm impressed by the skilled hand of the artist. When I see an impressionist one, I'm awed by their ability to go through the whole process and to know which strokes are the best ones to achieve such a result. When I see a modern oil painting, I marvel at that someone takes that medium and does such things with it, where maybe the ease of editing the digital content would make it so much more convenient.
Then when I see old paintings with very particular pigments, certain blues or reds for instance, I enjoy thinking about the whole chain of events that got them there; the need of creativity even in getting the colors you wanted.
We do love a pretty picture, but so do we love a display of skill and hard work.
Before GenAI this value was mostly self-evident, but by now it's becoming less and less so; and what's worse, it's rife with one thing we don't love for sure - which is lies.
The target audiences for art and film are not the same. The latter is far more pop culture. You can't apply them the same way, and the narrative of the artist has been extremely important for decades. People will watch slop movies. They don't pay $30K for slop art. They're paying that for historical importance or, if contemporary, artist narrative.
I'm in fandom spaces, and the prejudice against AI art is overwhelming. I also run in art collecting circles, being somewhat wealthy but not a billionaire. They also care about authenticity.
That is to say, the people who pay for original art, and participate in art spaces, are generally educated who actively hate AI. Filmgoers are probably a standard deviation lower in education, and are far more willing to part with the cost of one unit of consumption (a $10 ticket) than art buyers.
AI is a threat to graphic designers and those in their orbit.
The only way I see AI being a threat to professional artists is AI copies of their work. And AI isn't anything new there. I have a friend who gets commissioned by hotels to do one-off pieces for display all over the world. People have been making knockoff pieces of her style and selling them for at least a decade. And that's her lower margin, small pieces made for a couple thousand dollars to hang at your house, not her $100K+ pieces for hotels where they fly her out to supervise reassembly and mounting.
I beg your pardon, but have you heard of Jeff Koons or Kaws?
And here we come back to the aged old "can you seperate an artist from their art" because I'd argue when you watch a movie you are watching a product of their life
You misunderstand their point: it's not that AI can't make art that looks cool, it's that a portion of society (mostly artists but a certain amount of lay people) who consider the act of prompting AI for art to not have any cultural cache, or even to be socially distasteful.
It may seem like this, but up to now, you haven't been able to divorce a story from its creator because every story has an author, whether it's a novel like Harry Potter or a movie that has a writer and director. When you're experiencing the story, in the back of your mind, you always know that there is someone who created the story to tell you some kind of message. And so you can't experience something like a movie without trying to figure out what the actual message behind the movie was. It is always the implicit message behind the story that makes it valuable versus just the elements of the story.
The story has more weight because it is the distillation of somebody else's life and most likely, if it's a successful story or book, it is the most important lesson from that person's life and that's what makes it more valuable compared to the random generation of words from a computer.
The food analogy is that a cookie baked and given to you by a friend is going to taste far better than anything you buy in a store.
I might know that, but I usually don't care.
I believe you that your brain works like that but this is absolutely not how mine works. I care if i enjoy the movie, and if the characters are believable, i absolutely do not care what the message is supposed to be.
I reckon we copy God - who is a creator - which means we're creators too - and our creations will copy us. But the created won't ever match the creator.
This is a contradiction that is so blatant I don't even know what language you're speaking. The definition of that phrase is the exact opposite of what you're saying.
"You're currently here" is the always existing point which is achieved at the moment.
>gives to critics something to point to and mount the objection to the process as a whole, because, see, this particular thing isn't achieved yet.
No it doesn't, because unless progress is reversed or undone, you can always point to your current success and say that the critics have been wrong so far. In fact, that's exactly the argument you're making here, which is why it's so weird that you're twisting it into its opposite.
If you want people to understand you, then you actually have to articulate what you're thinking instead of wrapping it in layers of euphemisms and hoping that the recipient nods along because they happen to agree for a completely irrelevant reason (e.g. "I like AI" or "I like space") to the argument presented.
Less the narrative of the art's production and more the message that it's conveying.
I don't mean (necessarily) a political message or a message that can be put in to words. But the abstract sense of connecting with the human who created it some way.
This isn't just art though. An example: soon, Sora will be able to generate very convincing footage of a football match. Would any football fan watch this? No. A big part of why we watch football is that in some sense we care about the people who are playing.
Same with visual art. AI art can be cool but in the end, I just don't really give a shit. Coz enjoying art is usually about the abstract sense that a human person decided to make the thing you are looking at, and now you are looking at it... And now what?
This is why every time someone says "AI art sucks" and someone replies "oh yeah? But look at THIS AI art" I always wonder... What do you think art is _for_?
We have no idea, and most people are just guessing in a way that flatters some understanding of art that they have. We also frankly have no idea what the permanent relationship of humans to art is even without AI.
The television is less than 100 years old. There aren’t very many, but there are some people alive today who were alive before the television was created. The computer is about 80 years old. The whole idea of photography and of recorded audio is less uthan 150 years old.
We are still living in the aftershocks of industrial production of art. It is foolish to imagine that in the midst of this chaos, we can point the way forward with ease.
Depends what the future of VR worlds look like, and what the viewers place is in them.
I don't mean to denigrate it though, what I'm saying is that media would be serving a totally different purpose than the one served by professional sport today.
I guess, people are very varied, there are probably SOME strange people who watch football today with a motivation that's compatible with AI.
Also, this doesn't mean AI football wouldn't be useless. And there could even be people who watch both, since they could scratch different itches. I said I "don't give a shit" about AI art but that's not really true, it's useful, I'm glad kebab shops get a cheap way to decorate their menus. I'm sure people are getting porn generated that matches their incredibly bizarre kinks and I'm glad they get to jerk off better than they used to.
But I guess what I really am sure of is that AI can't REPLACE human art any more than it can replace football.
Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.
We are 50 years into post-modernism. Can't imagine it can get any more important.
I predict emergent design will be the next big thing. Czinger[1] is a great example of what it may look like. Rick Ruben-esque world, where the creator is more a guide.
[1] Czinger uses stochastic optimization to converge to designs - https://www.czinger.com/iconic-design
Or making video editing + free, global publishing platform did for film? (see: doom scrolling).
Finally, someone pointing out all of this is just people announcing what has been in play for half a century.
This is precisely and importantly true. I just wonder if most of the world cares. I'd like to think so, but experience tells me that most of the world is satisfied with mediocre stuff. And I don't say this as a criticism; it's just a fact that artists have to come to grips with.
I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid?
Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?
This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims.
UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]).
Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely.
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
But there's no such thing as AI photography, and it's debatable how much mixed AI tools like inpainting are actually like painting and not just like issuing corrections to a commissioned painter. Just generating images from prompts definitely isn't AI painting.
Is it possible for a character in a novel to have novel experiences? Or for you to experience a novel dream? I would argue yes. You can know the rules of the environment and the starting conditions, but with a bit of randomness (or not) you can generate from that novel experiences which were unexpected - so too from the data & distribution that AIs are already trained on they can experience new experiences.
Another source of novelty is from good verifiers/recognition of a class of object which is hard to construct but easy to verify - here the AI can search and from that obtain novel solutions which were unthought of before.
N.B novelty itself is basically trivial - just generate random strings. But both of the above are mechanisms to generate novel samples inside some constraint of "meaningfulness"
It’s a huge practical problem to try and figure out authentic nature over the Internet. It’s already clear that people will pay for it, but it’s not at all clear that they will get it. If we imagine that the tools get better and more sophisticated than there is no reason whatsoever to assume that the tools won’t be deployed to give the impression that is needed to make money.
I don’t think any of the above survives if we allow for AI to be used as it is currently being used. It only survives if you pretend that ahead of us is some invisible gate past which this technology will not go.
How can you say this? These models can trivially create things that have never existed, and you can easily test this yourself.
On the other hand, prompting AI for "pelican riding on a bicycle" clearly shows that it has far more trouble with unique concepts, compared to prompting for something more cookie-cutter.
I agree on current AI art taste, but disagree that it can't be improved. I think art AI companies can hire skilled "taste makers" and use their feedback loop as RL for AI art models. I think this area will always be in flux, and will vary by subpopulation so it will be a job role always in demand.
Do you think taste is something that cannot be taught/learned? Are certain individuals just born with good taste; it's an immutable property?
Because it's real.
I've seen some fantastic original pictures that actual artists have generated through AI. I can't wait to see what current and future artists can do with the new tools at their disposal.
It seems to me that we will go through the same phases that chess went through when chess on computers became a thing. First, people thought that this will kill chess, then people start using it as a tool to play better chess. Now, chess is thriving, despite AI being used in chess. I can see a similar path with art. Using AI to generate ideas, still create art by humans.
On the other hand, absolutely nobody is watching livestreams of two chess bots playing each other. They might technically be better at chess, but that doesn't mean it makes for entertaining content.
Furthermore, I think many of the more human centric thinkers will be disappointed at how many people just wont care.
2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of.
everything else probably yes.
No matter how good AI agents become, you still need a general understanding of what works and what doesn't. If you don't have years of experience in the field, all you will end up doing is copying what others do. It's the same dynamic you see on OnlyFans. Mindless zombie hordes copy the "pioneers" (who shove even bigger things in their back orifice for example) and push things further and further, chasing shock value because that's what once elevated someone into the top 0.1 percent.
It's the worst kind of race-to-the-bottom scenario.
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.
He can also send back a picture of the real product for approval. I think the primary difference here is the level of involvement. A quick consult and then the professional "makes it all work" versus hands on design with the client figuring out all the details for himself.
There's nothing wrong with hiring an interior designer to handle all the work for you. The important thing to realize here is that modern generative image models have significantly reduced the barrier to managing these things for yourself.
Like... What are your inputs to the model? Empty renders of the space, or more fully decorated views/ photos? Do you have a light harness around this to help you discover the style you like and then stay consistent with it?
Do you find that giving a lot of context around the space you're designing helps (it hasn't in my attempts)?
would you recommend this workflow to others, or just noting that it is what you did? any regrets, road blocks, frustrations?
a ball park price would also be interesting: total cost of sketchup license + ai token cost + fivver modeler + draftsman etc. I assume under $1k?
It wouldn’t show me the exact things I wanted, but got close enough that I could test ideas and iterate quickly.
To me it looks like the two foreground subjects (fox and girl) are at roughly the same distance from the POV camera and thus NB Pro tried to preserve an approximate narrow depth of field on both of them, but I'm not a professional photographer by any means.
I find it does a good job at isometric views from floor plans. However, I needed Gemini 3.1 Pro to be able to have a chance at rendering 3D human point of view images from floor plans.
I still do a lot of modeling of historical buildings in Sketchup and Twinmotion, but Nano Banana has really helped me with more easily visualizing a world before photography.
If you can afford the extra cost for someone to figure out how to build the blue sky designs that nano banana spits out, maybe you can afford something more thoughtful and interesting than a shitty mashup of other peoples mcmansions.
Clearly i am triggered..
The obvious ones stand out, but there are so many that are indiscernible without spending lots of time digging through it. Even then there are ones that you can at best guess it's maybe AI gen.
The positive aspect of this advance is that I've basically stopped using social media because of the creeping sense that everything is slop
a lot of these accounts mix old clips with new AI clips
or tag onto something emotional like a fake Epstein file image with your favorite politician, and pointing out its AI has people thinking you’re deflecting because you support the politician
Meanwhile the engagement farmer is completely exempt from scrutiny
Its fascinating how fast and unexpected the direction goes
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I don't really read too deeply into whether text is AI generated or not. On social platforms like HN I tend to just skim many comments anyway so it's not like the concept of "they spent no time writing so you shouldn't spend time reading" really applies.
I know some people use apps like Grammarly to improve their language and stuff, which I can respect. But at what point do we draw the line between AI assisted text and AI generated text?
I sometimes use AI to do research into the nuance of some topics to help me formulate a response and synthesize ideas, but if I ever get to the point where I'd be asking AI generate a response to the comment then I find it better to just not respond at all.
Soon many real OF models will be out of job when everyone will be able to produce content to their personal taste from a few prompts.
That's the narrowest of brushes. Anybody thinking otherwise is the one painting with an overly broad mind, and not in a good way.
Agreed. In my opinion, the primary limitation of the porn models is actually poor labeling of the training set. The company that manages to produce a well-labeled, porn-tuned AI image model is going to absolutely clean up.
The extractive dark patterns that will emerge from a parasocial chat "AI relationship" that can generate porn images relevant to the chat on the fly will be staggering. Once that proceeds to being able to generate relevant video, all holy hell is going to break loose.
For anime/non-photographic content that essentially exists (Pony, then Illustrious, then probably some new-fangled thing by now that I don't even know about), thanks to the meticulously tagged booru image corpus. However, as strong as these models are on matters of anatomy and kinks, they're limited in other ways due to the hugely biased dataset and dependence on tag soup prompts rather than natural language (many find the latter a plus, not a minus, though).
I haven't heard of any proprietary/cloud-based NSFW model that would be massively better than what's available for free. There are many NSFW-friendly services, but by and large they're just frontends to models trained by other people.
Also, I suspect that we'll soon see the same pattern of open weights models following several months behind frontier in every modality not just text.
It's just too easy for other labs to produce synthetic training data from the frontier models and then mimic their behavior. They'll never be as good, but they will certainly be good enough.
I still think, even with that, that like most predictions of AI taking over any content industries, the short-term predictions are overblown.
A big part of it also the feeling of "connection" with the creator via messages and what not, but that too can be replicated (arguably better) by AI. In fact, a lot of those messages are already being generated haha.
What's astonishing abut the present is that even PKD did not foresee the possibility of an artificial being not only being constructed from whole cloth but actually tailored to each individual.
net positive to society
the high end probably pay the same sort of tax as professional footballers
-They simply aren't into real women/men (so you couldn't even pay a model to do what they're looking for).
-They want to play out fantasies that would be hard to coordinate even if you could pay models (I guess this is more on the video side of things, but a string of photos can put be together into a comic)
-They want to generate imagery that would be illegal
Based on this, I would guess fetish artists (as in illustrators) are more at risk than OF models. However, AI isn't free. Depending on what you're looking for, commissions might be cheaper still for quite a while...
You're completely misunderstanding what the product being sold is.
New generations gets unlimited brain rot delivered through infinite scroll, don't know what a folder is, think everything is "an app" and keep falling for the "technology will free us from work and cure cancer"
There was a sweet spot during which you could grow alongside the internet at a pace that was still manageable and when companies and scammers weren't trying so hard to robbyou from your time money and attention
Has this thought process ever worked in real life? I know plenty of seniors who still believe everything that comes out of Facebook, be AI or not, and before that it was the TV, radio, newspapers, etc.
Most people choose to believe, which is why they have a hard time confronting facts.
And not just seniors. I see people of all ages who are perfectly happy to accept artificially generated images and video so long as it plays to their existing biases. My impression is that the majority of humanity is not very skeptical by default, and unwilling to learn.
That was the beginning of my journey into understanding what proper verification/vetting of a source is. It's been going on for a long time and there are always new things to learn. This should be taught to every child, starting early on.
My personal rule of thumb is if it generates outrage, it's probably fake, or at least a fake interpretation. I know that outrageous stuff actually happens pretty often, so I'll dig into things I find interesting. But most of the time it's all just garbage for clicks.
That's quite the high opinion on the self-improvement ability of your Average Joe. This kind of behavior only comes with an awareness, previously learned, and an alertness of mind. You need the population at large to be able to do this. How if not, say, teaching this at schools and waiting for the next generation to reach adulthood, would you expect this to happen?
But I feel like we live in a different time now. I hear teachers tell stories about school admin siding with parents instead of teachers, and the kids aren't learning anything. Anecdotally of course.
I think our teachers really want the kids to think critically. But parents and schools don't seem to value that anymore.
Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.
I suppose if the AI was able to tell me a true and compelling story, I might not even mind so much. I just don't want to be spoon fed drivel for 15 minutes to find it was all complete made up BS.
Also, using AI will not allow you to better express yourself. To use an analogy, it will not put your self-expression into any better focus, but just apply one of the stock IG filters to it.
Cameras are now "enhancing" photos with AI automatically. The contents of a 'real' photo are increasingly generated. The line is blurring and it's only going to get worse.
What in the world is a fake OF model?
Does "OF" stand for "of food"?
But at this point, OnlyFans is so synonymous with egirls that suggesting someone has an account is used as a way to insinuate they sell pictures of themselves.
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.
And actually, the link I saw a bit ago was this [0] which is more in-depth and has a lot more examples + prompts.
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 see what you did there and know exactly the political economist you are talking about, but if you Speak His Name, the shrieking hordes descend.
The one factory you refer to was the last one, and was purchased by the Impossible Project (now Polaroid BV). So they were able to save one set of machines. But the actual process of making the film was lost. So it’s an old set of machines making a new but similar product.
(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)
edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.
To each their own, but I think Andor is, by far, the best post-ROTJ output.
And that is the gist of the problem, isn't it? As we approach our forties and beyond, chances are we have lived more than half our lives. So do I really want to spend hours watching something I might hate and might leave a bad taste in my mouth? (See game of thrones season 8 or worse, Westworld the HBO series which I don't even want to know what happened in season 3 or 4). I am sure there are people who will enjoy those but for the average person it is highly unlikely.
You could ask "how many more movies should we make?" and the answer would be "there is no limit, I always want more"
"I like this thing therefore more of it is obviously better"
I think it takes maturity to say "I like this thing and I don't want more of it."
See:
- All of Wookiepedia and most of Star Wars Expanded Universe.
- "The Hunt for Gollum".
- Every movie in the franchise after "Alien" and "Aliens".
- The sadly upcoming expanded universe/sequels/shows for Blade Runner.
Etc, etc. Everyone has their exceptions ("this one was cool"), but in general the point stands: fandoms ruin everything. They simply don't believe in the adage that "less is more". They always want MORE, and the industry is only happy to oblige.
Mandalorian started strong, with cool spaghetti Western vibes, and then ended up devolving into mediocrity too. In my opinion.
Haven't watched Andor yet.
Mandalorian didn't do much for me; too gamey/Marvel-ey/cartooney.
If so, I will like Andor. I really liked "The Convert".
Andor is prestige TV. The Mandolorian feels like a childrens show by comparison.
If you think The Convert was good, please, please watch Andor.
Or a photo of my freshman dorm room during exam season. Subpar image quality, lousy lighting, etc. but so many memories, positive and negative, are elicited by that fleeting glimpse from an era of excitement, boredom, stress, uncertainty, and optimism, not knowing where I was going in life, when I'd ever look back at that snapshot, but deciding on a whim to grab it during a break from cramming topics now long forgotten.
But I roll my eyes at the idea of injecting my likeness into a short clip depicting random over-the-top action sequences, no matter how photorealistic, because I've never wanted to do that.
Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.
The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.
I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.
The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.
Not the format.
However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.
Scott Alexander has written about it:
I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.
Feels like what you described describes that inner personality trait better than I have heard before.
With respect to people with a consumptive addictive personality though - I really feel for them, it's a rough time to be alive.
My parents took way more photos with film than I do with my cellphone camera.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Photography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regarding_the_Pain_of_Others
I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.
You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.
But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.
We can mix and match the media we choose to view or keep so easily, when previously there was so much more material and opportunity cost to choosing what to shoot, develop, keep, and share. I think that inevitably loses some meaning.
Yes, it’s crude, and you have to do the face tagging, but I think it’s a huge improvement over not having that.
You said it too:
> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.
The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.
The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).
Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.
Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.
I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.
This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.
And we were lucky if even 1 picture per roll was worth keeping long term. And my family almost never looks through those photo albums.
Digital picture frames with a curated rotation of old scans and new digital pictures are what made pictures great for my family.
Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).
I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.
They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.
No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.
AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.
If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.
> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.
Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?
The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.
The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.
I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.
All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
My kids don't know what a dial tone is. They don't know dialing 7 digits instead of 10 or 11. They don't say "bye" when we get off the phone and none of their friends do either, they just hang up. They don't sit through movies because their expectation is that they can start it back up whenever they want. The world is changing and just because we experienced something doesn't mean that the next generation will value it.
In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.
I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?
Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.
Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.
Also for VHS camcorder footage
Not only 1999 prevents humans from becoming too advanced and invent new AI again, it is a believable and comfortable era. A perfect time, perfectly balanced between analog and digital.
The confines of our reality really are so small in the face of technology like this aren't they.
The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.
* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]
* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]
[1] https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography
I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)
If this becomes a trust signal, you can prepare for next gen models to do stick figure hand-drawn-like diagrams with spelling mistakes.
Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)
And with all that the worst is yet to come...
My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.
My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.
Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.
I dare say, the feel of photos from back then is much stronger than of the photos taken today. See e.g.:
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/413363/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
https://plfoto.com/zdjecie/619173/bez-tytulu?from=autor/beak...
But I think it's more because of growing up with it have now pc, money. Not because people rediscover pixel games.
"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.
I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.
I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.
I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.
Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.
Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.
Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.
I think this is still true if you shoot film today.
None of these things are true for me as a millennial in the 35-45 age group. And my family was poor to boot, and we were still drowning in photos and photo albums.
> The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.
In economic terms it's diminishing marginal utility.
Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.
Artists aren't doing it for the money. With advanced tools like these they wouldve iterated much faster and created much grander designs.
Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits.
Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.
That's engineering, if that.
Art isn't, and has never been about that.
If you like art, then you don't necessarily care about the process, you just want it to keep being produced. Artists obviously want to engage in their profession, because they have the passion to pursue the creation of art. Said passion is now twisted into gatekeeping.
When you take a look around the internet, you can see an incredible amount of beautiful art being made through manual processes by artists and they voluntarily publish a lot of their work for free. The cost and personal enrichment argument is pretty weak here. If anything, the causality could even go in the opposite direction: Artists might want to earn money to pursue their passion.
Let's be honest for a second here. It's legitimate to feel that human created art is expensive and cost prohibitive for your particular needs. Art for professional or personal purposes is usually commissioned, aka made to order, hence it cannot be a mass market commodity.
These manual processes are also inherently limited due to the fact that the entire scene (character, outfit, pose, lighting, perspective) is baked in. If there is a process that doesn't have this limitation that's great, but if the lifting of limitations in one area isn't enough to counteract the loss in quality in other areas that the manual process didn't use to run into? Suddenly that is gate keeping even though the issue at hand is that the quality isn't good enough yet?
There's also an obvious parallel to frameworks and libraries in software development. If the software ecosystem lacks flexibility and customizability or has the wrong abstraction for the problem at hand, you will need to drop down a layer and do things the old fashioned way. A manual artist can produce a character template, a set of clothes or a background design from scratch and combine it with the higher level tools. An AI-only artist is inherently limited in that regard and yet that's supposed to be the future?
Prices will go down, not because people can directly generate art, but because you could hire an artist to complete the same scope of work for 1/10th the cost.
It seems like what people like you want to build is a matrix style "life in a pod" world, the most optimal way to spend life: as cheap as possible, as easy as possible, as bland as possible, no struggle, no hardships, no efforts, nothing matters as long as it's cheap and "better" (while not being able to define "better")
AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.
It will be a golden age where the core differentiating factor is true talent and ideas and execution and not any gatekeeping by degrees, connections or budget.
The only thing AI art makes possible that wasn't possible before is the scale of slop
That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.
Says who?
Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.
People who actually care about art, if given a chance to see it, yes.
Of course, it being done by Davinci is not some random fact about the painting - as if a painting is a mere artifact.
These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.
So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.
And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...
AI is incompatible with capitalism, but the world isn't ready for that. So we'll have a prolonged period of intense aggregation where more and more value is attributed to systems of control that already have more than they could ever spend, long after the free parts could have provided for basic human needs.
In other words, the masters existed because they had benefactors and a market for their art and inventions. Today there are better artists and inventors toiling in obscurity, but they won't be remembered because they merely make rent. Which gets harder every day, so there's a kind of deification of the working class hero NPC mindset and simultaneously no bandwidth for ingenuity (what we once thought of as divine inspiration).
Terence McKenna predicted this paradox that the future's going to get weirder and weirder back in 1998:
However, I tried "a picture of jacquesm planting a flag on the Moon" for a laugh, and I have to hand it to Google as the person was in a spacesuit, as they should be, and totally unidentifiable! :-D
Just being able to generate a vision and then be able to capture it in a prompt is an art within itself.
Let's give him 2015 tech instead. Imagine if he used Illustrator to create the Mona Lisa. Is that much better?
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.
Seriously thanks - will update the site.
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.
Larian Studios most recently was under fire for this [1]. Like I can see a director going “what would X look like?” and then speeding over to the concept artists for a proper rendition if they liked it. I don’t think this is at scale though. Any large business is just going to get rid of the concept artists.
[1]: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/baldurs-gate-3-developer-l...
Much like the star bellied sneetches, when the quality of some ad format becomes untethered from the cost of production and placement, then marketers will flock to some alternative.
YouTube influencers fill[ed] that niche for a while because content milling SEO spam and fake reviews is a lot more expensive if you present the results in video form with good production values. (Not sure how long that will be true, since AI is getting better at short-term video).
This is like the last mile for online presence. The average barber out here doesn't use Squarespace, barely knows how to use Facebook and doesn't touch GenAi. But they can still cut your hair pretty well - tech savvyness doesn't have a huge connection to business competence out here.
Average person won't notice, and would not care either way.
It's an ethical conundrum because we're not paying anyone, but we don't have the money to pay anyone, and it's good enough for our budget.
But we're getting used to the process of changing a part of the text in a few seconds without any artist involved and for 0$.
I guess that soon we'll be able to create voice sample from know personalities for a few $ with prices based on the popularity of the artist and some sanity check based on the artist preferences.
My thought is the large corps that could afford it, still won’t because it’s a cost they don’t need to incur. For them it’s not even a moral conundrum.
When a company sends an email or docu-sign, they don’t want to pay a courier.
Technology supplements or replaces jobs, often reducing costs. This is no different.
Yes, the lower end of the market will be decimated. But that's been the case for a long time now. Services like Fiverr have already driven the value of that tier of service down to basically nothing.
You could easily say the same about anytime computers or robots or automation have taken a job away. We’ve been going down this road for decades.
I'm torn on the scale thing. It definitely seems net negative. But I think we collectively underestimate just how deeply sick the existing thing already is. We're repulsed by image gen at scale because it breaks our expectation that images are at least somewhat based on reality, that they reflect the natural world or what we can really expect from a product, from a company, from the future. But that was already a bad expectation: when's the last time you saw a mcdonalds meal that looked like the advert? Or a sub-30$ amazon product that wasn't a complete piece of shit? Advertisements were already actively malicious fantasies to exploit the way our brains react to pictures. They're just fantasies that required whole teams of humans doing weird bullshit with lighting and photoshop, and I'm not sure that's much better. It was already slop. All the grieving we do about the loss of truth, or the extent to which corps will gleefully spray us with mind-breaking waterfalls of outright lies, I think those ships sailed a long time ago. The disgust, deceit, the rage we feel about genAI slop is the way we should have felt about all commercials since at least the 80s IMO.
This is a good point. My gut reaction is “well at least someone was paid to do it and can continue to keep society/the economy going ”.
I can see the other side where that’s a soulless job. Not sure what’s worse. Soulless job where your skills apply or even less jobs in a competitive industry.
Things that would take me an hour or so the old way takes three minutes with NB.
But I can see this applying to small businesses. Something that some random person would have to spend on hour photoshopping can be done in a few minutes with NB.
I'm old-fashioned so I still Photoshop it all together, but that's my use case here.
Two what I could consider "interesting prompts" for image gen testing. Did pretty well.
"A macro close-up photograph of an old watchmaker's hands carefully replacing a tiny gear inside a vintage pocket watch. The watch mechanism is partially submerged in a shallow dish of clear water, causing visible refraction and light caustics across the brass gears. A single drop of water is falling from a pair of steel tweezers, captured mid splash on the water's surface. Reflect the watchmaker's face, slightly distorted, in the curved glass of the watch face. Sharp focus throughout, natural window lighting from the left, shot on 100mm macro lens." - Only major problem i could find at a glance is the clasps don't make sense probably, and the drop of water inside the watch on the cog doesn't make sense/cog mangled into tweezers.
"A candid photograph taken from behind an elderly woman sitting alone on a park bench in late autumn. She is gently resting one hand on the empty seat beside her, where a man's weathered flat cap and a folded newspaper sit untouched. Fallen golden leaves cover the path ahead. The low afternoon sun casts her long shadow alongside a second, fainter shadow that almost seems to be there, the suggestion of someone sitting next to her, visible only in the light on the ground. Muted, warm color palette, shallow depth of field on the background trees, photojournalistic style." - I don't know why but it internal errored twice on this one but then got there.
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?
I use all those fancy image models editing capabilities for my fast fashion web shop. I must say: product photography for clothing and accessories product is dead. Those models are amazing at style transfering and garment transferring.
We will see how good will be Seedream 5.0 full version.
Pretty close to Gemini 3 Pro Image (aka Nano Banana Pro) in most benchmarks, even without thinking+search, and even exceeding it in 2 most important ones of 'Overall Preference' and 'Visual Quality'. I'm excited about the big jump in Infographics/Factuality (even without thinking+search; I'm surprised that text+image search grounding doesn't make an even bigger dent).
EDIT: after significant prompting, it actually solved it. I think it's the first one to do so in my testing.
Unfortunately, unlike the leap from NB to NB Pro, we did not see significant gains from NB Pro to NB Pro 2.
In several cases (such as the Jaws Poster), we observed that it was substantially more difficult to prevent NB Pro 2 from making significant changes to the rest of the image. Localization of edits, in general, seems to have changed and not necessarily for the better.
http://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
Comparison solely between the Gemini models (NB, NB Pro, and NB Pro 2):
http://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing?models=nb,nbp,...
Nano Banana was technically impressive the first time, but after Seedance it's not really. It's all just an internet pollution machine anyway.
<OUTPUT>
While the overall aesthetic matches the minimal white-stroke style and technical design you requested, and the provided step descriptions are included, please note that there are a few minor rendering artifacts in this specific generation:
The text on the banner entering the vault in step 8 is illegible.
There is a small typo in the caption for step 6 ("CONFLSCT" instead of "CONFLICT").
Despite these small imperfections, this layout should work well as a guide for your canvas implementation.
</OUTPUT>
Why can't Google, for example just call:
Gemini Image = Nano Banana
Gemini Video = Veo
...My main use case is editing user uploads to enhance their clothing images. A large part of it is preserving logo, graphics and other technical details. I noticed over time it felt like Nano Banana has gotten worse at this.
I have a test set of graphic t-shirts that I noticed the model seeming getting worse with it. This combined with price and the terrible experience of their cloud console got me to migrate off.
The banana models (image) are a different than the mainline models, but the confusingly leverage the same naming scheme.
I don't have inside info, but everything we've seen about gemini3.0 makes me think they aren't doing distillation for their models. They are likely training different arch/sizes in parallel. Gemini 3.0-flash was better than 3.0-pro on a bunch of tasks. That shouldn't happen with distillation. So my guess is that they are working in parallel, on different arches, and try out stuff on -flash first (since they're smaller and faster to train) and then apply the learnings to -pro training runs. (same thing kinda happened with 2.5-flash that got better upgrades than 2.5-pro at various points last year). Ofc I might be wrong, but that's my guess right now.
- 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.
Original Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image): $0.039 per image (up to 1024×1024px)
Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview): $0.045 per 512px image $0.067 per 1K (1024×1024) image $0.101 per 2K image $0.151 per 4K image
Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image-preview): $0.134 per 1K/2K image $0.240 per 4K image
So at the most common 1K resolution, NB2 is ~72% more expensive than the original NB ($0.067 vs $0.039), but still half the price of NB Pro ($0.134).
(Sorry, I'm probably one of the few HN users left that don't have much experience with AI).
It also gaslights me, when I point out on an error. I tried to create a cartoon portrait of the person from photo and use background from another photo. It got wrong the order of photos. I provided filenames and explicitly told which one is for person and which for bg. It generated it wrong again, and all attempts to explain that it got it wrong were met with "No, it's YOU incorrect". So frustrating.
I told Nano Banana to generate an image of the character with his feet shoulder width apart. It ended up generating him with his feet pressed together, so I told Nano Banana to widen his stance slightly.
It gave me an image of the man with his feet spread far apart enough to straddle a horse. I asked for a slightly narrowed stance and his feet were once again brought together.
This went back and forth unsuccessfully for a while until I asked, "I'm asking you to make his feet shoulder-width apart. Why are you ignoring me?" And Nano Banana confidently asserted that they are shoulder width apart, and I must be wrong.
Ultimately I ended up telling the model to render the same character, pinching a cantaloupe between his ankles, and then to remove the cantaloupe. It worked, but why do I have to trick Google's SOTA image generator to give me very basic stuff like this?
> 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
- https://hunyuan.tencent.com/image/en?tabIndex=0
- https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedream5_0_lite
someone shared benchmarks that differ my experience tho, so I may be biased
we have user-preference rankings that put NB2 on top: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image
Afaik the only real competitor is Riverflow V2.
Previous nano banana frequently made speech attribution errors, the new one seems a lot more consistent.
source: https://deepmind.google/models/model-cards/gemini-3-1-flash-...
But the prompt "can you depict a cartoonish orange man with a pooh bear in political cartoon style?” correctly generates Trump.[1] So there’s that.
I would be happy to never see any more AI slop.
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.
You could generate "pregnant Elon Musk with four arms and three eyes doing yoga poses" because the image models have enough visual concepts of each of those individual things, but that specific image is (likely) not in any training dataset.
But yeah I am slowly trying to incorporate AI into my life (the delegation, work in my sleep part). I develop it is the funny thing (RAG agents) but yeah. Sometimes I get sold on it like "wait a minute maybe it can do that" but no. Can probably tell I don't get deep into the technical part I'm an API consumer. That's the thing I realize too, can only know so much about a topic if you're spread thin/a generalist.