The first example of generating home interiors fills me with indescribable hatred. Recently real estate agents have taken to running every dilapidated unsellable apartment through these AI filters, and you have to scroll through a dozen of these Ikea-chic images of what the apartment presumably could look like, before you are allowed to see the horrors they are trying to peddle at insane prices.
California recently added new laws regarding AI in real estate. I think lighting corrections and cropping is allowed but other digitally altered images should include a link to the original.
I imagine if these cameras are adding or remove furniture, appliances or modifying flooring or the landscaping via AI it will be a problem.
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.
I mean it’s already fraud to do so today… you cannot misrepresent the condition of a property. I think the harm so far has just been wasted time and thus no standing for lawsuits yet.
It’s pretty much always been against the rules of the mls to use altered photos. Pre ai, people would sometimes get busted for making grass where there was none, or making walls with cracks a solid color. It’s not allowed to alter condition of property.
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.
> it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to
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.
> just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement
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 basically cannot enforce any laws on corporations when Republicans are in control. ~50% of voters decided that they should be able to do literally anything they want and Buyer Beware is a good way to structure society and commerce.
Do you really think 50% of voters thought this was what they were getting? I think most of them thought “dunno what is going on, but this guy seems confident and says it’ll be good if we vote for him”.
that's what I voted for and I'm happy about it. same for every single person in my circle.
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.
If you're willing to overlook the corruption, the self dealing, the disrespect for the Constitution and rule of law, and the racism, then I agree. There is no useful discourse to be had with you.
> I'd rather someone be rich before office not have their son work on a Ukrainian oil company while their father is VP that handles relations with said country.
You must be incensed over Jared Kushner's diplomatic roles and $2B investments from the Saudis, then?
He formed an investment group after leaving government. Hunter worked for an oil company (no experience) WHILE his father was overseeing the country relations. And the company he worked for was under investigation for corruption. Joe bragged about getting that prosecutor fired.
Meanwhile Jared got the Abraham Accords and is working on other peace deals.
Hunter was a crackhead being paid in diamonds by a corrupt oil company. Not the same is it?
And Trump's corruption is orders of magnitude worse.
Hunter Biden is not in office, is not running for office. I wouldn't support a campaign from him because "whose crotches were involved in your creation" is not a qualifying factor for much of anything besides assigning a last name.
Trump is in office, and is actively, brazenly corrupt. And you're OK with it for...reasons?
He wasn't, but his dad was at the time. That's the point.
My criticism is not of Hunter, but of Joe Biden. The last D president. The most popular D (by votes) in history.
It's worse for people to entirely to benefit purely based on if their dad is in charge. That's nepotism.
However Kushner is in office, he does work on peace deals in the middle east. He has an official title and does work with many countries and many people. It makes sense for him to make connections over there.
It's not unreal to believe he met people in SA and they all wanted to make a business deal on their own. That's individuals making their own decisions at noone's expense. No demands (like firing a prosecutor). Not quid pro quo.
It's unreal to believe Hunter had any knowledge about Ukrainian oil and being paid in diamonds was legit, plus his business partner outed him. And all while his dad was handling relations with that country, and while he bragged about getting the prosecutor fired that was investigating the company. That's quid pro quo. That's nepotism. That's corruption.
> However Kushner is in office, he does work on peace deals in the middle east. He has an official title and does work with many countries and many people.
Actually, that's part of the problem. Jared Kushner did have a formal government job during Trump's first admin. He does not have one in the 2nd term. He's not even a "special government employee" like they made Musk.
He's a "volunteer" who is then given substantial foreign policy influence in a region where he is also a substantial financial player. And it all happens with him having no formal duty to the United States, no particular rules of the road for what's allowed and what's not, because he's (quite intentionally, IMO) existing in a gray area.
Thankyou for responding with your view, and I'm sorry that you got downvoted for it. I don't agree that "[people] should be able to do literally anything they want and Buyer Beware is a good way to structure society and commerce" because I feel that a degree of safety from bad actors is part of the social contract in a healthy society, and that the strong and capable have a duty to protect and support those less able. I understand, however, that not everyone feels that way and that I'm not entitled to tell them what to think. That's why we vote on stuff, and it mostly works.
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.
> The overturning of the Chevron doctrine removed the ability of the government to do many kinds of proactive enforcement.
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.)
The legislative process (particularly nowadays) moves too slow to react to changes in the real world. The administrative processes provided a gap-fill function that could be somewhat more responsive. That is now lost.
Okay, if that's what you meant then I don't think it's pertinent to this specific situation, since false advertising laws passed by the legislature already exist. They just need to be enforced.
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.
>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.
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.
> it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to.
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.
I mean, what’s the problem with taking such stickers off? I’d love if it we had fewer retarded warnings. And I fail to see how they have anything to do with enforcing consumer protections.
The stickers are because somebody got hurt. That's the only reason why they're there. And hopefully it helps somebody. It doesn't hurt anything to have the sticker, lol.
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.
This same thing happened to me almost 20 years ago without AI. The pictures were all of another identical apartment in the building.
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.
It already is in a lot of jurisdictions for photo-shopping photos.
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.
You can renovate your home to match an altered image, but you cant change the colour of the actual sky so in a sense that is “more false” advertising. :)
Quite a few times I've seen permanent light fixtures that don't exist, vents that don't exist, room sizes that are obviously implied to be much larger than reality (e.g. they show a full-size bed, but there's only like 4 feet of space in that location), etc.
I don't particularly mind fake furniture, but if it's very much not to scale I think it's pushing "probably fraud". And when permanent fixtures are fabricated, "blatant fraud, penalize immediately, revoke license on repeats". Using an automated tool does not absolve you of consequences, particularly one nigh-universally well-known to fabricate things.
I can’t tell through text if you’re being sarcastic or not. So I’ll add some context for fun. Ran into this a few weeks ago apartment shopping with a friend. AI images of multiple apartments had:
- Relocated the sink from the back counter to the kitchen island.
- Added outlets that didn’t exist.
- Displayed furniture layouts that were not possible in the actual space. That couch looks great in that spot, except when you explore further you realize it’s sitting right up against the master bedroom’s door.
To that last point, no stager would lay it out that way because anyone viewing the apartment would take them to task for you know… having to drag a couch out of the way to open their bedroom door. Staging layouts have always been more pretty than practical but AI staging regularly puts functionally DOA layouts on display.
As far as I’m concerned it’s disingenuous at best, and deception realistically. The process is broken while this slop is in there.
I think the real issue here is lack of progress in AR technology. Tenants may be disappointed by the difference between marketing material and reality, but that can be easily solved by AR glasses that the tenants can wear 24/7 to make the apartment look just like in marketing material, perhaps for a small monthly subscription fee. It's cheaper than renovation, that's for sure.
I'm not sure if you're being serious but it should be illegal because they're producing images that are often not physically possible. At least if an agent stages an apartment with real furniture they are doing something a tenant really could do. But these AI images tend to change the physical dimensions of a room, use images of furniture that don't make sense dimensionally, shift the "natural" light of the room in a way that the sun will never provide and sometimes even change the view through the windows of the room.
Honestly, given the dangerously unmitigated power of Claude Mythos, we should really look into arresting the people who have failed to ask Claude to cure cancer already.
As a rule of thumb, if it is just replacing staging, I don’t have an issue with it. A staged apartment also isn’t “real” so if the AI isn’t adding windows and outlets that don’t exist it’s functionally equivalent to staging.
Most real estate agents are going to stage a house or condo for real regardless because people are really going to go there, not just look at pictures online or show up with a VR headset. So in practice this is only going to affect rental units that are not staged.
And it's borderline fraud, I think I saw an apartment on Streeteasy where they were able to 'fit' an entire desk, drawers and a queen size bed, obviously these image models just scale these down to proportions that just don't exist in real life.
the actual bedroom could only fit queen size bed ;(
I don't hate virtual decorations in apartment sales images, since it helps with trying to get a scale of the room, but the AI ones these days just make it completely impossible to trust. I've seen plenty where I have a hard time believing it could actually fit the furniture in the picture. Obviously a real estate agent should check that the images have realistic proportions, but there's no signal that I could trust them. It just says "decorated with AI" or something.
Accepting 100% that it should be in some way deemed unacceptable (socially or legally) to fake what an apartment actually looks like, I did find using an image model really helpful in making design choices for my bathroom remodel. Mostly about whether to tile certain things where we couldn't quite visualize ourselves what the effect on the entire space would be.
It should be the same as rule #1 of machine translation: never machine translate something for your recipient unless they ask for it. They may not need it.
If they do need it, they almost certainly know where to find machine translation. A bad translation with no original is worse than nothing, because you often end up having to mentally backtranslate a broken version of your native language in order to understand what they were trying to say.
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.
There's a big difference of someone using the tool to make design decisions for work they are actually going to implement vs someone using the same tool to make one think it has already been done
AI has very uniquely made creating these faked/impossible layout images one of the cheapest & easiest things you can do at the moment, even if it didn't introduce the concept. Simultaneously, AI has had very little cost reduction impact on much else. This change in relative balance is how AI has created the new version of the problem and it's not apparent how this imbalance was always bound to occur without AI.
Just having a good photographer is amazing. When my friend was selling their place I was amazed and how good the house looked in the listing. How big it looked, when I know it was not big. This was before AI filters were available. So not a new issue but certainly made worse and cheaper to do.
Even if you're not a good photographer, wide angle lenses make rooms look enormous, by exaggerating the size difference between close and far objects. Before AI most estate agents used that.
I just started seeing these pop up a few weeks ago after some very obvious AI edits appeared in my searches. It’s entirely possibly realtors have been doing this for years now, just in less obvious ways. This crosses the line for me as they’re clearly making spaces look far bigger and brighter than they actually are. Straight up fraudulent and deceptive behavior.
In a sane world, this would be a clear cut case of false advertisement, and the real estate agents would be held liable for fraud. Sadly, we don't live in a sane world.
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.
I keep hoping the fucking barn doors people are putting in houses now are an AI illusion, but that's never the case. Barn doors. In the god damned house. Talk about a crime.
I sense a business opportunity: a web app that de-sloppifies real estate, airbnb, and vrbo photos! See what it really looks like, thanks to the power of AI!
Using it for "staging" shitty rentals is pretty gross, but I used Nano Banana to make some mockups for a bath room remodel I'm doing and it worked pretty great.
Instead of fighting the use of AI for home interior picture, it might be more useful to have an AI that can correct the fabricated images. If the listing includes room sizes, an AI should be able to give you more realistic images. Maybe a browser plugin that makes all content honest?
What is an original image? A good photographer can also create a completely different impression. And it's hard to get rules applied, suing is often too expensive, for consumers, and governments need to reduce costs, so don't have the funding. It will not be enforceable enough that people wont try tampering with their picture.
If you make it a technical solution, e.g., browser plugin, it become an economic opportunity that can create money instead of cost money.
> 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.
I think it makes houses/apartment less likely to sell. When you see the idealized version, and then the reality, the impact is much bigger then just showing reality.
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.
When you do get the privilege of seeing the unit in person, yeah. This is obviously the case for most home sales.
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.
No one said they "need" to. But there is more generally more than one landlord in a market, and they might feel pressured to keep up with their competitors' use of AI.
There needs to be lawsuits over stuff like that. I don't get why people accept blatant false advertising just cause the tech used to do it is new. They may as well be uploading pictures of a real, nicer apartment with a similar layout. What's the difference?
Honestly a great start up would be a review system for house listings.
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.
Announcers get very touchy with listings data, so even compiling listings from multiple sources is hard without getting cease-and-desisted. Then, realtors will certainly flood competing announcements and post fake reviews. It's an aggressive market.
Honestly just market to customers that feel deceived. They just log in and enter an address and post a review. No listing data needed.
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.)
Isnt this what people have been doing for years now with their phone filters? misrepresenting their physical appearance in order to sell the idea that they are something they're not
I received early access to test this model. (through work — Google still does not like me personally lol)
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.
You can set aspect ratios with NB2 Lite programmatically through Vertex [1]. I updated the program I use to help create all the images for GenAI Showdown, set the model ID to `gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image`, and was able to use aspect ratios like 16:9, 4:3, and others.
Can it make diagrams that can be imported into .pptx or google slides as actual diagrams (SVG in PowerPoint I guess) i.e. you can move the components, there are real arrows, etc… or does it strictly produce raster images?
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.”
Why is that desirable, or how is that faster, for something where you are just moving the shapes around visually anyway? Kinda feel like I could drag the blue pill to center of the rectangle faster than typing out the instruction..
Because the interface sucks. It previews in an embedded viewer, exports to pptx, imports into Google Slides, then I can edit it there but if I want to make further edits on other slides, I’m basically stuck because Claude can’t export from Google Slides back to pptx.
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.
You can, and I could probably make Cowork drive the browser to do this (iirc I might have tried and it stopped cus it couldn’t access downloads pane); and I can do it manually.
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 :)
I read it as "Google is indifferent to me" rather than "Google specifically dislikes me", as a point of clarification that they didn't get access by being personally selected.
That's nice but it's on google's broken AI studio thing. I can't use half the stuff on there because it requires a Google One account. Which I'm ineligible for because I'm on a workspace account. Can I switch? No, because Google One doesn't support own domains.
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.
shameless plug burlap will let you just use keys from gemini studio or openai and try stuff out without messing with the web interfaces. that's (one reason) i made it
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?
I had a similar situation. Google really needs to improve its model usage and payment UX.
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.
FYI: If you are willing to pay API rates AI studio supports using API keys. To do this on the slashed off key icon on the bottom left of the textbox and go through the process
Yeah I'm kinda in the same position. I pay for both One and Workspace for myself and not sure which to use for some of this stuff. I mostly default to my personal account since it has more context, but then bringing in stuff from the Workspace Drive/etc. is an extra few steps.
And some stuff like Project Genie is just flat out unavailable on Workspace which seems weird to me.
Yeah I've already got a game plan - move the email to proton & sign up for claude to replace gemini search/chat...which I do use heavily. Works out more expensive but claude pro seems to include a little coding agent usage too. Already have one of those (GLM) but a bit of anthropic allowance would be nice
The problem is extracting oneself from google is non-trivial. That must be a decade of emails...
Proton has a pretty good importer for GMail/Calendar/Contacts.
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.
I like the Migadu migration guide: install thunderbird, add both accounts, simply move the folder from one account to the other. Messy is the Google label system which tends to create dupes in thunderbird so you need to do some label cleanup first.
The speed is definitely impressive. I'm seeing under 5 seconds per image vs ~30 seconds for base NB2.
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.
That is fair to point out. For those who don't know, ChatGPT Image 2 has an absurd ELO of 1387; compared to the #2 model at 1273, it's over 100 points higher (https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image). The tradeoff is latency, and ChatGPT Image 2 at High is...slow (~2 minutes at 1024x1024). In both cases it would have skewed the charts here to uselessness.
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.
While I have no experience with it personally (no interest in image gen) my aunt was raving about current chatgpt image model for "restoring" / working with old photos - sharpening, changing some small details like ill-fitting background. It takes her a bunch of prompting but eventually she gets things just right. In comparison, current gemini output (supposedly) tends to be subtly off, details aren’t quite right, proportions are subtly changed etc.
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
ChatGPT image is a lot more aesthetically coherent when I do a layman's test between Gemini and ChatGPT (both through their chat interface). It just breaks down in subsequent editing (around 3-4 editing prompts). That is to say Gemini also does the same, but I felt it degrades more gracefully in subsequent editing runs.
Please do write about it, there are still definitely people interested.
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.
That arena leaderboard has some questionable results. Anyone who's used these models would know that ranking HiDream above Krea2 is a pretty hot take.
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.
I definitely appreciated your post about Nano Banana Pro. It's also a genuinely useful time-capsule for how these systems evolve and where they fall short. I've preferred the output of ChatGPT Image 2. I think a post would be very helpful for folks to see what they're missing.
and also left out Nano Banana Pro, which in my opinion is still better in many cases then NB2 ... even on the site arena.ai, it's still best at editing
... does it? Are you seeing something I'm not seeing? Number one is that this just doesn't appear to be true (non-lite versions beat it across the board it seems), number two is that this specifically is a low-cost bulk model and not a SOTA frontier model, of course the benchmarks are lower.
I was surprised with how well grok imagine performed when reviewing fast image generation. It balances quality, speed and cost really well with under $0.02 per 1K image within a few seconds.
Krea-2 is fantastic. If you can get around the restrictive license, output speed, and JSON prompting, Ideogram 4 probably comes the closest to SOTA models. See my profile for GenAI Showdown, where it's benched against other local and proprietary models.
It actually scored above Gemini 2.5 (aka the original NB) which is pretty impressive.
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.)
Wow, that's a pretty massive decrease in latency, which should unlock some use cases, but the linked web page doesn't exactly make it straightforward to understand the differences between the models.
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.
I'm way behind in imagegen - only using it occasionally for roleplaying tokens, goofing around, and random personal assets. To me, this is nuts. It's able to create images in like 2 seconds... before with chatgpt it would take 30s-1m for the same quality image. I don't get the negative comments here
I've been testing for the last 2 hours and compared to GPT Image 2. The pricing for 1K resolution it costs $0.0342, takes 8 seconds (not 3 sec). Compared to the GPT Image 2 api ($0.0414 for the same res, responding in 35-45 seconds) I am pleased with its quality and pricing. The texts come garbled, it adds them to every image generated without the prompt, but negative prompts do work well to remove those.
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.
Expensive and Google doesn't even have enough resources to decently deploy a model like that. Creating 10 images in parallel gives me RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED error, which is a painfully common error when using Google AI products.
> Google doesn't even have enough resources to decently deploy a model like that
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.
Because people don't want random water marks being applied to their artwork. We've been using AI edited image and video using "filters" for years and the world hasn't ended. Time and time again these AI labs will fear monger how bad and dangerous these AI models are when in reality it is not the case and is just an excuse for them to exert power over others using their lead.
no human wrote the prompts listed as example prompts here.
"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
Llama was great for research and propelling the opensource community but they haven't been a serious competitor in a while. Whereas Google is one of the top 3 AI labs in America.
I'm trying it out to illustrate news articles and I'm getting this for 95% of my prompts. I guess I'm holding it wrong \(ツ)/¯
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).
The first example of generating home interiors fills me with indescribable hatred. Recently real estate agents have taken to running every dilapidated unsellable apartment through these AI filters, and you have to scroll through a dozen of these Ikea-chic images of what the apartment presumably could look like, before you are allowed to see the horrors they are trying to peddle at insane prices.
I think that should be illegal and misrepresenting. Lots of gray area with AI usage.
California recently added new laws regarding AI in real estate. I think lighting corrections and cropping is allowed but other digitally altered images should include a link to the original.
https://lewisbrisbois.com/insights/clientalerts/new-californ...
https://dre.ca.gov/Licensees/Advisories/Advisory_2026_03_17_...
what is considered original? AI enhancements built into the camera will be part of the original?
I imagine if these cameras are adding or remove furniture, appliances or modifying flooring or the landscaping via AI it will be a problem.
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.
I mean it’s already fraud to do so today… you cannot misrepresent the condition of a property. I think the harm so far has just been wasted time and thus no standing for lawsuits yet.
You can stage a property with furniture. Previously that was done with rental furniture.
Yes but that cost a lot more money.
Easily a 8k rental.
It’s pretty much always been against the rules of the mls to use altered photos. Pre ai, people would sometimes get busted for making grass where there was none, or making walls with cracks a solid color. It’s not allowed to alter condition of property.
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.
Wouldn't that fall under existing false advertising laws, if you're putting fake/altered images in the listing?
It should, I would assume. But for some reason, it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to.
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...
> it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to
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.
> just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement
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 basically cannot enforce any laws on corporations when Republicans are in control. ~50% of voters decided that they should be able to do literally anything they want and Buyer Beware is a good way to structure society and commerce.
Do you really think 50% of voters thought this was what they were getting? I think most of them thought “dunno what is going on, but this guy seems confident and says it’ll be good if we vote for him”.
that's what I voted for and I'm happy about it. same for every single person in my circle.
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.
Which part attracts you the most? The corruption, the self-dealing, the disrespect for the Constitution and the rule of law, or the racism?
prime example of why there can't be discourse happening right here ^
If you're willing to overlook the corruption, the self dealing, the disrespect for the Constitution and rule of law, and the racism, then I agree. There is no useful discourse to be had with you.
[flagged]
> I'd rather someone be rich before office not have their son work on a Ukrainian oil company while their father is VP that handles relations with said country.
You must be incensed over Jared Kushner's diplomatic roles and $2B investments from the Saudis, then?
He formed an investment group after leaving government. Hunter worked for an oil company (no experience) WHILE his father was overseeing the country relations. And the company he worked for was under investigation for corruption. Joe bragged about getting that prosecutor fired.
Meanwhile Jared got the Abraham Accords and is working on other peace deals.
Hunter was a crackhead being paid in diamonds by a corrupt oil company. Not the same is it?
I appreciate your answering your own question; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48750787.
> Hunter was a crackhead being paid in diamonds by a corrupt oil company. Not the same is it?
For sure. Kushner/Trump's corruption is far more lucrative.
I'm glad you can at least admit that the Biden's were corrupt.
And Trump's corruption is orders of magnitude worse.
Hunter Biden is not in office, is not running for office. I wouldn't support a campaign from him because "whose crotches were involved in your creation" is not a qualifying factor for much of anything besides assigning a last name.
Trump is in office, and is actively, brazenly corrupt. And you're OK with it for...reasons?
He wasn't, but his dad was at the time. That's the point.
My criticism is not of Hunter, but of Joe Biden. The last D president. The most popular D (by votes) in history.
It's worse for people to entirely to benefit purely based on if their dad is in charge. That's nepotism.
However Kushner is in office, he does work on peace deals in the middle east. He has an official title and does work with many countries and many people. It makes sense for him to make connections over there.
It's not unreal to believe he met people in SA and they all wanted to make a business deal on their own. That's individuals making their own decisions at noone's expense. No demands (like firing a prosecutor). Not quid pro quo.
It's unreal to believe Hunter had any knowledge about Ukrainian oil and being paid in diamonds was legit, plus his business partner outed him. And all while his dad was handling relations with that country, and while he bragged about getting the prosecutor fired that was investigating the company. That's quid pro quo. That's nepotism. That's corruption.
> However Kushner is in office, he does work on peace deals in the middle east. He has an official title and does work with many countries and many people.
Actually, that's part of the problem. Jared Kushner did have a formal government job during Trump's first admin. He does not have one in the 2nd term. He's not even a "special government employee" like they made Musk.
He's a "volunteer" who is then given substantial foreign policy influence in a region where he is also a substantial financial player. And it all happens with him having no formal duty to the United States, no particular rules of the road for what's allowed and what's not, because he's (quite intentionally, IMO) existing in a gray area.
Some questions for you to ponder on -
What purpose does Trump Crypto serve?
Why was CZ pardoned?
Answer the question.
Ah, the irony.
how is it irony? the guy asked loaded "questions" basically saying everything is racist and evil. not really good faith is it?
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.
Thankyou for responding with your view, and I'm sorry that you got downvoted for it. I don't agree that "[people] should be able to do literally anything they want and Buyer Beware is a good way to structure society and commerce" because I feel that a degree of safety from bad actors is part of the social contract in a healthy society, and that the strong and capable have a duty to protect and support those less able. I understand, however, that not everyone feels that way and that I'm not entitled to tell them what to think. That's why we vote on stuff, and it mostly works.
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.
> The overturning of the Chevron doctrine removed the ability of the government to do many kinds of proactive enforcement.
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.)
The legislative process (particularly nowadays) moves too slow to react to changes in the real world. The administrative processes provided a gap-fill function that could be somewhat more responsive. That is now lost.
Okay, if that's what you meant then I don't think it's pertinent to this specific situation, since false advertising laws passed by the legislature already exist. They just need to be enforced.
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.
>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.
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.
I understand your intent, but:
> 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.
> Our regulatory agencies have either been completely gutted by DOGE, or just no longer have an appetite to do any kind of proactive enforcement
Well yeah. That's what they ran on, and people voted for it.
> it seems nobody is enforcing consumer protections like they used to.
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.
> Pretty soon they'll take the stickers off mowers warning people to not put their hand under it while it's running.
Good.
I mean, what’s the problem with taking such stickers off? I’d love if it we had fewer retarded warnings. And I fail to see how they have anything to do with enforcing consumer protections.
The stickers are because somebody got hurt. That's the only reason why they're there. And hopefully it helps somebody. It doesn't hurt anything to have the sticker, lol.
Trump Mobile did the same with the false advertising of their phone, and that’s apparently okay.
> that’s apparently okay
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.
This same thing happened to me almost 20 years ago without AI. The pictures were all of another identical apartment in the building.
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”.
It already is in a lot of jurisdictions for photo-shopping photos.
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.
You can renovate your home to match an altered image, but you cant change the colour of the actual sky so in a sense that is “more false” advertising. :)
It seems the solution could be quite simple.
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.
That only works if the fix is cheaper than their lawyer. You’ll have to sue.
If you do sue and it’s a rental, good luck renting ever again. You’ll never pass the background checks.
[flagged]
Quite a few times I've seen permanent light fixtures that don't exist, vents that don't exist, room sizes that are obviously implied to be much larger than reality (e.g. they show a full-size bed, but there's only like 4 feet of space in that location), etc.
I don't particularly mind fake furniture, but if it's very much not to scale I think it's pushing "probably fraud". And when permanent fixtures are fabricated, "blatant fraud, penalize immediately, revoke license on repeats". Using an automated tool does not absolve you of consequences, particularly one nigh-universally well-known to fabricate things.
Oh, and little touches like an ugly fence being replaced by a sweeping view of a beach or a mountain range.
lol. Minor touchups!
Anything which could have a material impact on the sale price which is misrepresented in images is fraud, plain and simple.
I was seeing the fake light fixtures in listing photos at least four years ago.
Fake furniture is bad enough (the scale issue you mention is the main problem) but fake parts of the house should definitely be illegal.
What, after all, is a bit of light fraud, if it saves an estate agent some time?
I can’t tell through text if you’re being sarcastic or not. So I’ll add some context for fun. Ran into this a few weeks ago apartment shopping with a friend. AI images of multiple apartments had:
- Relocated the sink from the back counter to the kitchen island.
- Added outlets that didn’t exist.
- Displayed furniture layouts that were not possible in the actual space. That couch looks great in that spot, except when you explore further you realize it’s sitting right up against the master bedroom’s door.
To that last point, no stager would lay it out that way because anyone viewing the apartment would take them to task for you know… having to drag a couch out of the way to open their bedroom door. Staging layouts have always been more pretty than practical but AI staging regularly puts functionally DOA layouts on display.
As far as I’m concerned it’s disingenuous at best, and deception realistically. The process is broken while this slop is in there.
I think the real issue here is lack of progress in AR technology. Tenants may be disappointed by the difference between marketing material and reality, but that can be easily solved by AR glasses that the tenants can wear 24/7 to make the apartment look just like in marketing material, perhaps for a small monthly subscription fee. It's cheaper than renovation, that's for sure.
Mark Zuckerberg should take note.
Now you're thinking like a silicon valley founder! Brilliant! Call the company "Lipstyk" as in the old phrase about lipstick on a pig.
I'm not sure if you're being serious but it should be illegal because they're producing images that are often not physically possible. At least if an agent stages an apartment with real furniture they are doing something a tenant really could do. But these AI images tend to change the physical dimensions of a room, use images of furniture that don't make sense dimensionally, shift the "natural" light of the room in a way that the sun will never provide and sometimes even change the view through the windows of the room.
I think their last sentence is a pretty clear indicator that they were not being serious.
As with bitcoin fans before them, Poe's Law is in full effect with the AI boosters.
‘Catfishing is fine’
Honestly, given the dangerously unmitigated power of Claude Mythos, we should really look into arresting the people who have failed to ask Claude to cure cancer already.
As a rule of thumb, if it is just replacing staging, I don’t have an issue with it. A staged apartment also isn’t “real” so if the AI isn’t adding windows and outlets that don’t exist it’s functionally equivalent to staging.
Most real estate agents are going to stage a house or condo for real regardless because people are really going to go there, not just look at pictures online or show up with a VR headset. So in practice this is only going to affect rental units that are not staged.
I imagine this is a much larger problem in high turnover rental markets.
Fraud is not the same as productivity buddy
The circa 2026 tech industry c-suite crowd respectfully, but vigorously, disagrees.
It.... took me awhile to register that sarcasm. Bravo.
This is satire, correct?
/s?
And it's borderline fraud, I think I saw an apartment on Streeteasy where they were able to 'fit' an entire desk, drawers and a queen size bed, obviously these image models just scale these down to proportions that just don't exist in real life.
the actual bedroom could only fit queen size bed ;(
How is that borderline, that’s just actual fraud.
[flagged]
This type of comment is generally frowned upon on hn.
That's what the upvote/downvote feature is for.
“This” is one of the most nonsensical Reddit mannerisms, it’s karma-farming instead of upvoting.
Wait, Are you saying 2 adults and a kid should barely fit a queen bed?
https://www.amazon.com/iDOO-Mattress-Inflatable-Camping-infl...
I guess you could call it a Qwen size bed
I don't hate virtual decorations in apartment sales images, since it helps with trying to get a scale of the room, but the AI ones these days just make it completely impossible to trust. I've seen plenty where I have a hard time believing it could actually fit the furniture in the picture. Obviously a real estate agent should check that the images have realistic proportions, but there's no signal that I could trust them. It just says "decorated with AI" or something.
Accepting 100% that it should be in some way deemed unacceptable (socially or legally) to fake what an apartment actually looks like, I did find using an image model really helpful in making design choices for my bathroom remodel. Mostly about whether to tile certain things where we couldn't quite visualize ourselves what the effect on the entire space would be.
It should be the same as rule #1 of machine translation: never machine translate something for your recipient unless they ask for it. They may not need it. If they do need it, they almost certainly know where to find machine translation. A bad translation with no original is worse than nothing, because you often end up having to mentally backtranslate a broken version of your native language in order to understand what they were trying to say.
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.
There's a big difference of someone using the tool to make design decisions for work they are actually going to implement vs someone using the same tool to make one think it has already been done
Where I live (NYC) putting altered images like that has been the norm for more than a decade.
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)
Also NYC. A classic was mounting a bright light outside a window so it appears as “sun-drenched” as the description claimed.
(Unrelated, my favorite one was getting to the apartment and learning the “bedroom” was a flex wall in the kitchen)
AI has very uniquely made creating these faked/impossible layout images one of the cheapest & easiest things you can do at the moment, even if it didn't introduce the concept. Simultaneously, AI has had very little cost reduction impact on much else. This change in relative balance is how AI has created the new version of the problem and it's not apparent how this imbalance was always bound to occur without AI.
Just having a good photographer is amazing. When my friend was selling their place I was amazed and how good the house looked in the listing. How big it looked, when I know it was not big. This was before AI filters were available. So not a new issue but certainly made worse and cheaper to do.
Even if you're not a good photographer, wide angle lenses make rooms look enormous, by exaggerating the size difference between close and far objects. Before AI most estate agents used that.
I just started seeing these pop up a few weeks ago after some very obvious AI edits appeared in my searches. It’s entirely possibly realtors have been doing this for years now, just in less obvious ways. This crosses the line for me as they’re clearly making spaces look far bigger and brighter than they actually are. Straight up fraudulent and deceptive behavior.
In a sane world, this would be a clear cut case of false advertisement, and the real estate agents would be held liable for fraud. Sadly, we don't live in a sane world.
This!!
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.
I keep hoping the fucking barn doors people are putting in houses now are an AI illusion, but that's never the case. Barn doors. In the god damned house. Talk about a crime.
I sense a business opportunity: a web app that de-sloppifies real estate, airbnb, and vrbo photos! See what it really looks like, thanks to the power of AI!
Using it for "staging" shitty rentals is pretty gross, but I used Nano Banana to make some mockups for a bath room remodel I'm doing and it worked pretty great.
AirBnB folks are doing the same.
Instead of fighting the use of AI for home interior picture, it might be more useful to have an AI that can correct the fabricated images. If the listing includes room sizes, an AI should be able to give you more realistic images. Maybe a browser plugin that makes all content honest?
Why would that be more useful than fighting this fraud? Surely the original images would be more realistic than one passed through AI two times.
What is an original image? A good photographer can also create a completely different impression. And it's hard to get rules applied, suing is often too expensive, for consumers, and governments need to reduce costs, so don't have the funding. It will not be enforceable enough that people wont try tampering with their picture.
If you make it a technical solution, e.g., browser plugin, it become an economic opportunity that can create money instead of cost money.
> 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.
That's actually illegal in most states.
I think it makes houses/apartment less likely to sell. When you see the idealized version, and then the reality, the impact is much bigger then just showing reality.
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.
When you do get the privilege of seeing the unit in person, yeah. This is obviously the case for most home sales.
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.
If the industry is currently so favourable to the landlord, then why would they need to alter images in the first place?
No one said they "need" to. But there is more generally more than one landlord in a market, and they might feel pressured to keep up with their competitors' use of AI.
Because it's all about revenue, and falsehoods help justify even higher prices.
There needs to be lawsuits over stuff like that. I don't get why people accept blatant false advertising just cause the tech used to do it is new. They may as well be uploading pictures of a real, nicer apartment with a similar layout. What's the difference?
The difference is you'll get caught a luddite and hear you're opposing progress if you try to get in the way of AI doing any and everything.
I don't think that matters in a court of law.
Honestly a great start up would be a review system for house listings.
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.
Announcers get very touchy with listings data, so even compiling listings from multiple sources is hard without getting cease-and-desisted. Then, realtors will certainly flood competing announcements and post fake reviews. It's an aggressive market.
Honestly just market to customers that feel deceived. They just log in and enter an address and post a review. No listing data needed.
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.)
Isnt this what people have been doing for years now with their phone filters? misrepresenting their physical appearance in order to sell the idea that they are something they're not
The entire real estate industry is disgusting.
[dead]
I received early access to test this model. (through work — Google still does not like me personally lol)
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.
You can set aspect ratios with NB2 Lite programmatically through Vertex [1]. I updated the program I use to help create all the images for GenAI Showdown, set the model ID to `gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image`, and was able to use aspect ratios like 16:9, 4:3, and others.
[1] - https://cloud.google.com/developers/vertex-ai
Can it make diagrams that can be imported into .pptx or google slides as actual diagrams (SVG in PowerPoint I guess) i.e. you can move the components, there are real arrows, etc… or does it strictly produce raster images?
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.”
Why is that desirable, or how is that faster, for something where you are just moving the shapes around visually anyway? Kinda feel like I could drag the blue pill to center of the rectangle faster than typing out the instruction..
Because the interface sucks. It previews in an embedded viewer, exports to pptx, imports into Google Slides, then I can edit it there but if I want to make further edits on other slides, I’m basically stuck because Claude can’t export from Google Slides back to pptx.
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.
Ah gotcha. Well, whatever you are working on sounds like absolute hell. Sorry for that.
Can one not export pptx from google drive anymore? That's a bummer. I remember it working quite well in the past.
You can, and I could probably make Cowork drive the browser to do this (iirc I might have tried and it stopped cus it couldn’t access downloads pane); and I can do it manually.
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 :)
What kind of work are you doing that requires automated image generation at scale?
White House intern
Sunshine and butterfly hugs I’m sure
but until this comes to edge gallery i won't care
> Google still does not like me personally lol
Please elaborate.
I read it as "Google is indifferent to me" rather than "Google specifically dislikes me", as a point of clarification that they didn't get access by being personally selected.
That's nice but it's on google's broken AI studio thing. I can't use half the stuff on there because it requires a Google One account. Which I'm ineligible for because I'm on a workspace account. Can I switch? No, because Google One doesn't support own domains.
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.
shameless plug burlap will let you just use keys from gemini studio or openai and try stuff out without messing with the web interfaces. that's (one reason) i made it
https://www.burlap.app/download
That looks solid.
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?
Probably busy mirroring binary search trees? ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102
Any plans for other platforms?
for the app or the keys?
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.
great explainer video!
thanks! i have been trying to articulate why i built this, and in what ways the approach is fundamentally different.
I had a similar situation. Google really needs to improve its model usage and payment UX.
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.
It's on Google Flow. For whatever reason, it's free and I've never hit a usage cap.
FYI: If you are willing to pay API rates AI studio supports using API keys. To do this on the slashed off key icon on the bottom left of the textbox and go through the process
Yeah I'm kinda in the same position. I pay for both One and Workspace for myself and not sure which to use for some of this stuff. I mostly default to my personal account since it has more context, but then bringing in stuff from the Workspace Drive/etc. is an extra few steps.
And some stuff like Project Genie is just flat out unavailable on Workspace which seems weird to me.
Yeah I've already got a game plan - move the email to proton & sign up for claude to replace gemini search/chat...which I do use heavily. Works out more expensive but claude pro seems to include a little coding agent usage too. Already have one of those (GLM) but a bit of anthropic allowance would be nice
The problem is extracting oneself from google is non-trivial. That must be a decade of emails...
Proton has a pretty good importer for GMail/Calendar/Contacts.
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.
Good to know re importer. Helpful.
Their iOS mail app is fine though doesn’t do offline caching as well as Gmail
I like the Migadu migration guide: install thunderbird, add both accounts, simply move the folder from one account to the other. Messy is the Google label system which tends to create dupes in thunderbird so you need to do some label cleanup first.
The speed is definitely impressive. I'm seeing under 5 seconds per image vs ~30 seconds for base NB2.
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 tried something like that but an error told me it couldn't do anything with children. Did that change?
Plot twist: His kids are in their forties, they just really like illustrated stories
Haven't experienced any errors related to children. Will get the random copyright error though.
They didnt include chatgpt in the comparison chart. That tells a lot
That is fair to point out. For those who don't know, ChatGPT Image 2 has an absurd ELO of 1387; compared to the #2 model at 1273, it's over 100 points higher (https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text-to-image). The tradeoff is latency, and ChatGPT Image 2 at High is...slow (~2 minutes at 1024x1024). In both cases it would have skewed the charts here to uselessness.
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.
While I have no experience with it personally (no interest in image gen) my aunt was raving about current chatgpt image model for "restoring" / working with old photos - sharpening, changing some small details like ill-fitting background. It takes her a bunch of prompting but eventually she gets things just right. In comparison, current gemini output (supposedly) tends to be subtly off, details aren’t quite right, proportions are subtly changed etc.
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
ChatGPT image is a lot more aesthetically coherent when I do a layman's test between Gemini and ChatGPT (both through their chat interface). It just breaks down in subsequent editing (around 3-4 editing prompts). That is to say Gemini also does the same, but I felt it degrades more gracefully in subsequent editing runs.
Please do write about it, there are still definitely people interested.
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.
That arena leaderboard has some questionable results. Anyone who's used these models would know that ranking HiDream above Krea2 is a pretty hot take.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
I definitely appreciated your post about Nano Banana Pro. It's also a genuinely useful time-capsule for how these systems evolve and where they fall short. I've preferred the output of ChatGPT Image 2. I think a post would be very helpful for folks to see what they're missing.
ChatGPT Image 2 is genuinely insane.
I was surprised the internet didn't have a meltdown when it released.
and also left out Nano Banana Pro, which in my opinion is still better in many cases then NB2 ... even on the site arena.ai, it's still best at editing
Yeah given Google's order of progression
A lot of us are still expecting Google to drop a Pro version of NB 2 but that hasn't happened yet...It's sort of amazing that Grok's image model beats Nano Banana on nearly every one of the metrics they chose to highlight.
... does it? Are you seeing something I'm not seeing? Number one is that this just doesn't appear to be true (non-lite versions beat it across the board it seems), number two is that this specifically is a low-cost bulk model and not a SOTA frontier model, of course the benchmarks are lower.
It’s not a universal win, but grok outperforms on 2 of the metrics, and is close on a third.
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.
I was surprised with how well grok imagine performed when reviewing fast image generation. It balances quality, speed and cost really well with under $0.02 per 1K image within a few seconds.
I guess less security boundaries have some advantages
I loved Nano Banana Pro. Are there local alternatives yet? I heard about Qwen Image, Klein and recently Krea, any suggestions?
Krea-2 is fantastic. If you can get around the restrictive license, output speed, and JSON prompting, Ideogram 4 probably comes the closest to SOTA models. See my profile for GenAI Showdown, where it's benched against other local and proprietary models.
It actually scored above Gemini 2.5 (aka the original NB) which is pretty impressive.
Public AI benchmarks are fucking stupid and can be completely ignored. Too gamed.
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.
To a degree.
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.)
Krea2 has been remarkable for me so far, and, I suspect, the reason why Google kicked this out so suddenly.
Krea is good. Check out r/StableDiffusion for more information on the open SOTA.
Have you tried Z-Image (Turbo)?
Wow, that's a pretty massive decrease in latency, which should unlock some use cases, but the linked web page doesn't exactly make it straightforward to understand the differences between the models.
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?
I'm way behind in imagegen - only using it occasionally for roleplaying tokens, goofing around, and random personal assets. To me, this is nuts. It's able to create images in like 2 seconds... before with chatgpt it would take 30s-1m for the same quality image. I don't get the negative comments here
ChatGPT detail is a lot better though. You can do stuff like complex 6-panel comics that Nano Banana can't match.
Also a lot of the negative comments are from people who hate the very idea of AI art and want it to fail.
Different use cases.
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.
[dead]
I've been testing for the last 2 hours and compared to GPT Image 2. The pricing for 1K resolution it costs $0.0342, takes 8 seconds (not 3 sec). Compared to the GPT Image 2 api ($0.0414 for the same res, responding in 35-45 seconds) I am pleased with its quality and pricing. The texts come garbled, it adds them to every image generated without the prompt, but negative prompts do work well to remove those.
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.
It's only half the full model price, $30/m output: https://cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/ge...
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.
It seems to respond to edits much better than the current production image model, which often stubbornly locks on to prior iterations of the images.
How do you get the ~real time prototype things shown in the "hands on" section of this page?
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
one of the most ethically barren products to come out of this era
Expensive and Google doesn't even have enough resources to decently deploy a model like that. Creating 10 images in parallel gives me RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED error, which is a painfully common error when using Google AI products.
> Google doesn't even have enough resources to decently deploy a model like that
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.
At least from this page it looks like the images generated don't have a watermark on them. Hopefully there isn't an invisible one either.
The article says that all images have SynthID watermark which is invisible mark indicating the image was AI generated.
Why would you prefer otherwise? Seems like tragedy of the commons to release flood of unmarked AI generation images, among many other risks.
Because people don't want random water marks being applied to their artwork. We've been using AI edited image and video using "filters" for years and the world hasn't ended. Time and time again these AI labs will fear monger how bad and dangerous these AI models are when in reality it is not the case and is just an excuse for them to exert power over others using their lead.
If you can’t see the watermark (you called it “invisible”) then what’s the issue?
You can see it depending on the image since it adds noise to the image.
It's really fast. But fast in a way that reminds me this joke:
> Does this pill make me smater?
> No, but it can make you dumb faster!
It will probably remind French speakers of this: https://youtu.be/G7NB_RwtPx4?t=5m18s
NB2 is an impressive tool. Camera File -> Heavy Changes in NB2 -> Final Tweaks in Photoshop -> Production Image
Can it do that with high fidelity to the source; e.g., denoise and restore?
no human wrote the prompts listed as example prompts here.
"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
gemini is so far behind. starting to wonder if their strategy is launching the low cost alternative to image/text models. last release was 3.5 flash
Imagine saying Gemini is so far behind when Llama has unreleased max models from last year that are currently beat by quantized Qwen2.5 models.
Llama was great for research and propelling the opensource community but they haven't been a serious competitor in a while. Whereas Google is one of the top 3 AI labs in America.
People inside deep mind are using Claude code
I'm trying it out to illustrate news articles and I'm getting this for 95% of my prompts. I guess I'm holding it wrong \(ツ)/¯
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).
Whats the use cases where cheaper and faster img models are key differentiators?
I mean 3 cents compared to 6 cents doesnt seem like much in my mind-unless youre running a consumer saas
[dead]
Where is the pelican on bicycle test results?
Because for imagegen models it'd be a meaningless benchmark. It's designed to test codegen models for their UI/UX capabilities.
So the image model's benchmark is to generate an image with the corresponding SVG sources.
[dead]