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Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

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Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>fake OF models 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.

People already have access to every form of niche pornography they could dare to imagine (for absolutely free!), I really doubt that 'personal taste' is the part that makes OF models their money. They'll be fine.

I think you're under-estimating how much personal taste applies in that industry. Yes, there's a lot of free content but it's often low quality and/or difficult to find for a particular niche. The OF pages, and other paid sites, are curated collections of high quality stuff that can satisfy particular cravings repeatedly with minimal effort.

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.

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#142
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>fake OF models 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.

And they might have to gasp! get an honest job!

That's a pretty wide brush you are painting with there

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#143

I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal. 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…

People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.

[deleted]

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#144
post #43

What a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo... Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.

I feel like the complete opposite is true. 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.

I hear this often and it's such a strange view of art, like the only thing that matters is scale and speed. It's a perspective so colored by mechanization that it fails to account for other philosophies in art. Think of what, say the Arts and Crafts movement was all about!

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#145

I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal. 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…

Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#146

Google updated it early in AI Studio so I've been experimenting: - 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 Ban…

The pricing changes are interesting. I wonder if at some point they will deprecate the less expensive model to increase their margins.

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).

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#147

Since talking images, are there any AI models that can output real transparent gifs/pngs? And not a (botched) fake white/gray grid background that is commonly used to visualize transparency?

You can output to a plain background and use any number of tools to mask it.

I know. It sounds like a perfect task for AI to do it though (wasn't the whole premise of AI do to mundane things for us), yet they fail to do it, and I need to use an external tool.

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#148

These image gen models are getting so advanced and life like that increasingly the general public are being duped into believing AI images are actually real (ex Facebook food images or fake OF models). Don't get me wrong I will enjoy the benefits of using this model for expressing myself better than ever before, but can't help feeling there's something also very insidious about these models too.

This has been true for a while with digital art, photoshop, etc. Over time, people's BS detectors get tuned. I mean, scrolling by quickly in a feed, yeah, you might miss if an image is "real" or not, but if you see a series of photos side by side of the same subject (like an OF model), you'll figure it out.

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.

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#149

I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal. 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…

> I'm sure this has been written about

Scott Alexander has written about it:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-colors-of-her-coat

Re: Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

#150

What a great thing this didn't exist in the past. We likely wouldn't have had any of the amazing artworks that we have now. Imagine an AI generated Mona Lisa, Nightwatch or Sistine Chapel ceiling because prompting would have been so much cheaper than paying Leonardo, Rembrandt or Michelangelo... Now extrapolate to all other artforms. Sculpture seems safe, for now, but only barely so.

Ironically we live in a time that, overall, is probably better for artists than the world any of those guys grew up in. People have always valued art but not the artists, and many artists through history, including the famous ones, died broke with their works only posthumously attaining value. These days, through commissions, art is a much more viable profession than it ever was.

Is it though? It was for the last 20 years but I’d imagine sales of commissions are down immensely and going down every day
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