Nano Banana 2 Lite
deepmind.google
deepmind.google
Pretty soon they'll take the stickers off mowers warning people to not put their hand under it while it's running.
The world isn't in a good place...
I'll preface this by saying that I don't agree with how things are working currently. But, the way the existing protections get enforced is by an individual or group of individuals filing lawsuits.
Our regulatory agencies have either been completely gutted by DOGE, or just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement, so its now up to the victims who have been wronged to bring the violation to the attention of the courts/regulatory bodies responsible for enforcement.
Part of me feels like this is intentional and by design, because bringing suit is an expensive and time consuming process and naturally locks out the people harmed the most by these violations. Its the same method by which slumlords/bad landlords get away with so many blatant violations of the various landlord/tenant laws; their tenants can't afford the lawsuits and the lawyers to protect themselves.
The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like.
lol
Have you tried finding a lawyer recently? For anything?
>The legal system needs to be made much more accessible, but I'm not sure how that happens or what that looks like.
As far as consumer protection goes, the party with greater resources or sophistication (e.g., if you retain counsel against a pro se defendant or plaintiff) should have a higher standard of proof; be forced to follow formal procedural rules, no matter the venue; and bear all costs if they're the ones who brought suit. If you use the court system as an arm of your business, you shouldn't get any leniency in terms of crossing your t's and dotting your i's. I don't know how you get there, but that's the fastest way to level the playing field.
> As far as consumer protection goes, the party with greater resources or sophistication (e.g., if you retain counsel against a pro se defendant or plaintiff) should have a higher standard of proof
No. Holding parties to different standards of evidence is a horrible idea and would do so much harm to a legal system that is already in many cases failing to function the way it was intended.
Determining who has "greater resources or sophistication" is itself a very thorny issue. For example, class action lawyers often look for Average Joes to become lead plaintiffs in highly-targeted lawsuits. These lawsuits are, in at least some if not many cases, designed less to defend the interests of individuals who have been harmed in some way (even theoretically) and more to extract settlements that result in hefty legal fees for themselves.
In these cases, it would be naive to treat the plaintiffs (who I would argue are proxies for the attorneys) as the parties with fewer resources or sophistication.
We already do that. Plaintiffs can introduce whatever, and as long as it's plausible, defendants have to directly prove it's a falsehood or otherwise inadmissible (not just that it's plausibly so, perhaps circumstantially). Sewer service is a glaring example.
>In these cases, it would be naive to treat the plaintiffs (who I would argue are proxies for the attorneys) as the parties with fewer resources or sophistication.
You're assuming that I disagree. Pro bono/contingent/discounted hours billed would count towards "greater resources or sophistication", and while I'm sure lawyers would love to argue whether or not that's fair, I think you'd find that the Average Joe would say so. And I'd really like to live in a system which has his needs in mind more than that of Dick C. Eshahl, Esq.
Well yeah. That's what they ran on, and people voted for it.
The overturning of the Chevron doctrine removed the ability of the government to do many kinds of proactive enforcement.
> Part of me feels like this is intentional and by design
It is absolutely intentional and by design. It aligns with other recent changes in the legal landscape, such as ending the ability for lower federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions. This requires more groups to accumulate more funds to pursue more lawsuits in more regions, re-establishing standing, re-establishing harms, re-arguing against the same harmful and illegal acts.
You're allowed to fight back, but only after you've been harmed, and only at great expense and effort, and with the deck stacked against you at every level.
you may not understand the other side because of biases but if you just say "oh 50% must be crazy / be stupid" then noone can have an honest debate. but I guess gone are those days.
nothing about policy or any specific thing you could have a civil conversation about.
they didn't even say what perceived racist, corrupt, etc. delusional take they're talking about.
unless I'm on a liberal newsletter how would I know the conspiracies they're talking about?
to answer in one word GP's main question "Which part attracts you the most?"
Sanity.
I still think that a large percentage of MAGA red hat voters (who don't necessarily represent all GOP voters) have bought into the populist rhetoric rather than actively understanding and supporting the actual policy but I'm sure there are plenty of people like you out there who are actively choosing this.
How does stopping agencies from making up their own interpretation of laws do anything to prevent proactive enforcement? (Do you just mean they're now more limited in their ability to make up new laws and proactively enforce those? I'm pretty sure prohibitions on false advertising are actual laws.)
Speaking more generally beyond the context of this specific situation, I agree representative democracy moves slower than other systems of government, but I personally don't think that's sufficient justification for ceding control of the legislative process to an unelected oligarchy. I think the overturning of cheveron was good push back against that trend.
This is one of the benefits Realtors(tm) and other licensing boards (lawyers etc) like to tout - we have a code of ethics, we self-regulate, you are safer with them than with Joe Agent, blah blah. You see how that goes.
Everything is "okay" with Trump. This social experiment got out of hand long ago. I mean come on, if we (as a society) allowed and okayed pedophilic tendencies, why do we keep looking for the lowest point on the bar? I'm pretty sure, Trump can consume human flesh on live TV and we'd just shrug it off and forget that even happened two weeks later.
https://lewisbrisbois.com/insights/clientalerts/new-californ...
https://dre.ca.gov/Licensees/Advisories/Advisory_2026_03_17_...
Edit: also if it becomes a big problem, in the future the law could be changed so that the real estate agent becomes liable to cover the cost of upgrading the property to match the altered image.
Basically you buy/rent whatever was advertised, and if reality doesn't match, welp thats a defect the seller/landlord must fix at their own expense.
Room shows a vent but in reality there isn't one? Well, the seller has to install it or cover the costs of what an installation would cost.
If you do sue and it’s a rental, good luck renting ever again. You’ll never pass the background checks.
Doctoring a photo slightly to make an area look larger, or just using a wide-angle lens though it can cause visible distortion. Removing unsightly poles, signs, trees, neighbouring properties was also common.
Making the sky bluer and removing clouds is acceptable.
Staging and virtual staging (including sky replacement and removal of trash cans) are allowed so long as they don’t alter the true nature of the salable property.
I am surprised that AI hasn’t been policed more. Probably they just don’t have the ops for it.
When we went there to see the one we’d actually be renting, it was clear it hadn’t been cleaned in years, doors were off the hinges, counters had holes burned in them, stove was kicked in, etc.
Ran fast from that “deal”.
the actual bedroom could only fit queen size bed ;(
https://www.amazon.com/iDOO-Mattress-Inflatable-Camping-infl...
It’s just used to be more expensive to hire someone to do it for you.
The altered images always e free stirs the same bright walls and grey magazine style furniture.
AI is just making it cheaper, but this was bound to happen.
(Images altered this way do have a small watermark stating so)
(Unrelated, my favorite one was getting to the apartment and learning the “bedroom” was a flex wall in the kitchen)
> e free stirs
Likewise, if I want to see AI renders of what the apartment may one day maybe look like - I can ask for it. Or make the render myself with my tool of choice. But I'll need to know what it actually looks like to do that.
Sadly Google in particular don't obey rule #1 even for machine translation, so it's going to be an uphill battle to get companies to understand.
Users can rate how accurate the description was, the real life flaws and even upload their own photos.
Side note: last time I looked for a house I really wasted 95% of my time because every house had one unique major flaw that would have made me not even bother going to see it.
You could get really sophisticated with quality checking reviews.
(We tend to believe all review systems have to be bad because that’s all we see. But most reviews systems are broken because a working system is a conflict of interest for the platform they’re on.)
2 months ago while looking for apartments, the majority of the pics shown were generated by AI. The pictures generated by AI often looked much more brighter, cleaner and larger and when I visited them in person, they were the opposite. I wasted so much time visiting due to this.
I understand the intention but the pictures are so wrong most of the time and hide so much imperfection that it should be illegal for false advertisement.
If you make it a technical solution, e.g., browser plugin, it become an economic opportunity that can create money instead of cost money.
Cool, so money is made from lying to me, and more money is to be made from what is fundamentally still lying to me, but with somewhat different intent.
That seems like a lot of pointless economic friction that doesn't generate real value, but what do I know.
Unless people prove me wrong, and they really fall for that...
Its like we used to be flooded with fisheye lens pictures of homes, that made the rooms way bigger then reality. I noticed that this trend (on the immo that i follow for years) has heavily reduced. Because nothing beats a sale, as people seeing something looking spacious on pictures and then in person seen its way more small/cramped/compact.
I love that new trend of 3D home viewing... It saves you so much time, and saves time for the immo people, filters out a lot of people with less interest.
But there are plenty of rental markets where you can be forced to rent without seeing that exact unit first. Common in big complexes, where you might get shown a "similar unit" or in markets where rental vacancy is so low that if you don't apply & sign within hours, you aren't getting that apartment because there's 20+ potential tenants for every rare vacancy. The current renal home I live in I rented without seeing it in person first because it was the only vacancy at the time, and in that market you must be first to sign the lease or you lose.
It works as advertised here, and it does behave like a distilled Nano Banana 2 with respect to certain elements such as good text rendering, which Nano Banana 1 does much worse with. It is definitely not at the level of the base Nano Banana 2 of course particularly with highly-nuanced prompts. My main criticism is that you cannot programmatically force aspect ratios with NB2L but you can with NB2.
That said, the price of $0.034/image is higher than expected since price is generally correlated with generation time, and it takes half the time to generate than a Nano Banana 1 image which costs $0.039/image. Google's assertion that you can directly replace NB1 pipelines with NB2L is fair.
Yesterday, Google announced that the Gemini app will allow free image generations (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/pe...) but did not specify which model would be used: I suspect it's the main motivation for Nano Banana 2 Lite.
Please elaborate.
Fable is the first model I found that can actually produce such diagrams in slides, in .pptx format that exports cleanly and consistently to Google slides, and is also able to iterate on those diagrams with specific feedback like “center align the arrow with the blue pill on the left which should be vertically aligned inside the dashed database container and make the arrow terminate in the left edge vertical center of the light blue object storage container.”
Technically cowork writes python scripts to do all the diagram positioning so if I go and make manual edits it’s not easy for Claude to change those back to the script anyway. Easier for me to guide it and it edits the scripts.
Can one not export pptx from google drive anymore? That's a bummer. I remember it working quite well in the past.
And aside from minor issues with fidelity loss from back and forth import/export translation… the main issue remains: drift in the pptx compared to the positioning of elements defined in the script Claude writes to generate the slide. It would need to read the new slide and identify the new positions and transpose them to its own positioning system. It’s just more consistent to instruct it on positioning. And frankly it’s easier — I prefer this workflow.
I do manual edits at the very end, but while iterating I don’t mind staying in one interface (the cowork chat), as long as the agent actually follows my instructions. That’s why I like fable… it’s the first model that follows them and creates diagrams of the precision and quality surpassing my own ability (at least in terms of time taken to make them).
And what I’m working on is a self-created hell borne from my own OCD and obsession with incredibly precise technical diagrams, including some that span multiple slides to build up the full diagram, so exact positioning is important :)
So I need to run (AND PAY!) two accounts to have both a nice email address and Banana? Starting to think the correct number of paid google accounts here is zero.
And some stuff like Project Genie is just flat out unavailable on Workspace which seems weird to me.
The problem is extracting oneself from google is non-trivial. That must be a decade of emails...
The downside is that their Android calendar app is shit (a rewrite should come later this year), and Android contact syncing doesn't exist (planned for 2027). Not sure how the situation looks on iOS, but AFAIK it's similar.
Their iOS mail app is fine though doesn’t do offline caching as well as Gmail
Alas UI isn't the problem. I want google to fix their broken plans.
Why can a FREE consumer account use antigravity but my $22 plan can't?
It's not even consistent within my account. I can generate a Banana 2 image in gemini interface but on aistudio it says I need to pay for an upgrade (which I can't).
Do they design their plans with a strong pull from a joint and a magic 8 ball?
for keys we support openai, google, bytedance, and wavespeed which is an aggregator that gives you access to most models.
if you are asking is Windows in the works, not near term. unless enough people ask i suppose.
My solution was OpenRouter. Their dev and testing chat can generate images with Google models, and you can also run the same prompt side by side with other models. It’s very handy for casual image generation.
I built an app for my kids that generates illustrated stories for them with them as the characters. I wanted to prioritize likeness while still stylizing the illustrations. I tested a bunch of models but none seem to come close to maintaining likeness when stylized. I find the others generate generic looking characters.
I'm excited to incorporate this into the onboarding of my app since I want the users to experience the aha moment as soon as possible and waiting half a minute+ isn't ideal. I'll still be using the main NB2 for the actual illustrations as this lite version still has slight issues with nuance and consistency as others have pointed out.
I want to do a writeup on ChatGPT Image 2 but at this point I don't think people care about nuanced image generation anymore...even though ChatGPT Image 2 crushes all my existing tests.
Many of these ELO comparative tests (ArtificialAnalysis is guilty as hell on this as well) also have other problems such as a considerable number of "amateur judges" tending to prioritize aesthetics over actual instruction-following given the prompt.
Also (less a critique of Arena.AI necessarily), but the MAI models are so incredibly locked down (e.g. censored) as to be functionally useless. I have a sneaking suspicion its fallout from Tay.
This is purely about generating images with people in them, I don’t think she’s doing any logic puzzles with gotchas and specific alignments of differently colored blocks and whatnot
I was surprised the internet didn't have a meltdown when it released.
I have also have noticed that GPT Image 2 is very good and has a great cost/result ratio compared to other models, specially using the low version which can cost 0.01 and is usually good enough for many use cases. I completely replaced Nano Banana for most of my workflows because I'm using API and the cost adds up. I still haven't tried Nano Banana 2 Lite but the price may be hard to justify, although the speed bump sounds good.
NB
NB Pro
NB 2
Image editing: banana 1308, grok 1329
Image generation: banana 1251, grok 1174 (grok loses, but is close)
Cost: banana 3.4 cents, grok 2 cents
Grok is a good image model, so it isn’t totally surprising, but it’s weird that they’d pick a set of metrics where they’re not the clear winner.
It actually scored above Gemini 2.5 (aka the original NB) which is pretty impressive.
However, your advice is right. KREA2 and Ideogram4. The latter being less commercially usable without what I would surely assume is a pain in the ass.
There are plenty of well-known public tests that have been around since SD 1.5 that I'd have to say if companies are trying to "game" they’re failing pretty badly (wine glass filled to the brim, the inverted piano, the nine-pointed star, etc.)
However, based off my personal experiences with general images models, Google in my opinion is the best for my workflows. Granted, I haven't tried far-east providers yet.
What does everyone else think?
People making images, where the image is the focal point, want to spend more per image.
Where images are parts of reports or throwaways or demos, cheap is the better approach.
Also a lot of the negative comments are from people who hate the very idea of AI art and want it to fail.
It tends to generate depressing-looking lighting, but if instructed, it overcomes it. Up close, faces also look pretty decent. I can still tell it is AI-generated, but to an untrained eye, it is nearly impossible to distinguish, especially for regular blog posts and ads.
Nano Banana is head and shoulders above the rest, but still too steep for personal use, and half off doesn't really mean much for enterprise if the results are worse. Hopefully this drives the rest to catch up at least.
gemini.g lets you add a canvas or use image gen, but it isn't clear to me how you stick in the "space lift" prompt and out comes what is demo'd
Probably not for free but tbf, Google did scale "AI Mode" globally to its billion+ users, with its Gemini 3 series. Pretty much broke my habit of searching the web with pplx & Chat.
Why would you prefer otherwise? Seems like tragedy of the commons to release flood of unmarked AI generation images, among many other risks.
> Does this pill make me smater?
> No, but it can make you dumb faster!
"In a breathtaking display of surreal transformation, a cinematic moment of pure action unfolds against a textured, golden-brown canvas. From the right, a woman is seen in elegant profile, her lips a startling slash of red. Her quiet composure is violently contradicted by the explosive event taking place: her dark hair is erupting, bursting forth into a chaotic flock of black birds. These creatures are captured mid-flight, a dynamic swarm launching from her mind and sweeping across the frame to the left. The motion is palpable; you can almost hear the frantic beating of a hundred wings as they break free. Some birds are still tangled, emerging from the dark mass of her hair, while others are already soaring into the open space. This is not a gentle release, but a powerful, almost violent, act of creation or liberation. The camera captures this impossible metamorphosis head-on, focusing on the sheer force of the birds' exodus. This highly sophisticated image is a kinetic masterpiece, portraying an internal storm made external, a thought process so intense it literally takes flight in a beautiful, dark, and unstoppable flurry of action."
really? anyone using for more than 10 or so tries these knows how to prompt them, and its not "The motion is palpable; you can almost hear the frantic beating of a hundred wings"
"surreal transformation, cinematic action. Textured golden-brown canvas. A woman in profile, red lips. Dark hair erupting into a flock of black birds mid-flight. Explosive metamorphosis" is pretty much all the actual meaning captured here
Unable to show the generated image. The model could not generate the image based on the prompt provided. You will not be charged for this request. Try rephrasing the prompt. If you think this was an error, [send feedback](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/troubleshooting).
I mean 3 cents compared to 6 cents doesnt seem like much in my mind-unless youre running a consumer saas