Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator

Imagination is the limit with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, which sports better character accuracy across scenes.
Butterfly dress in an NYC scene? No problem with nano banana. (Picture: Google)
After catching buzz on social media, the new generator was uncloaked as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image — and instantly landed on top of the leaderboards.

The trick to creating believable artificial images is to preserve the realism and character consistency across edits, Google says — and the new model has a «particular focus on maintaining a character’s likeness from one image to the next.»

Available in the Gemini app for free, it fares especially better than the competition on image editing and changing the scenery of a photo.

The model can take a picture of just about anyone and plop it into historically accurate scenes, predict the next move in a single image or series, or combine pictures to form a brand new scene.

This beats the competition, which often blurs or distorts characters in photos for even slight image edits, like changing the color of a shirt or removing the background, TechCrunch reports.

Extensive real world knowledge
The model relies on the knowledge base of Gemini 2.5 Flash for accurate world-building, and can draw impressive scenes to put characters in.

It can also solve sketched problems in a picture, like unfinished equations or incomplete descriptions right in the same photo, even including the same handwriting.

Now that the model is launched with a proper name, it lands slightly ahead of ChatGPTs Imagen on the LMarena leaderboard for text-to-image tasks, and is quite the leap ahead in image editing.

Won’t do intimate images
The model is decidedly not a free for all, though. It will refuse to make sexual deepfakes, or «intimate imagery,» and every output comes with a visible watermark — as well as a hidden one.

Now all we have to do is wait for the Internet to do its thing, there is already plenty of buzz on r/singularity today, and x.com is catching up.

Read more: Google’s launch post and developer page, writeups on TechCrunch, and 9to5Google

2 thoughts on “Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator”

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