Google Gemini’s AI image model gets a ‘bananas’ upgrade

Summary

Google is upgrading its Gemini chatbot with a new AI image model that gives users finer control over editing photos, a step meant to catch up with OpenAI’s popular image tools and draw users from ChatGPT. The update, called Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, rolls out starting Tuesday to all users in the Gemini app, as well as to developers via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, and Vertex AI platforms. Gemini’s new AI image model is designed to make more precise edits to images — based on natural language requests from users — while preserving the consistency of faces, animals, and other details, something that most rival tools struggle with. For instance, ask ChatGPT or xAI’s Grok to change the color of someone’s shirt in a photo, and the result might include a distorted face or an altered background. Gemini 2.5 Flash’s native image editor blends photos of a dog and person, while keeping their likeness. Credit: Google Google’s new tool has already drawn attention. In recent weeks, social media users raved over an impressive AI image editor in the crowdsourced evaluation platform, LMArena. The model appeared to users anonymously under the pseudonym “nano-banana.” Google says it’s behind the model (if it wasn’t obvious already from all the banana-related hints), which is really the native image capability within its flagship Gemini 2.5 Flash AI model. Google says the image model is state-of-the-art on LMArena and other benchmarks. Google claims its new AI image model is state-of-the-art on several benchmarks. CREDIT: GOOGLE “We’re really pushing visual quality forward, as well as the model’s ability to follow instructions,” said Nicole Brichtova, a product lead on visual generation models at Google DeepMind, in an interview with TechCrunch. “This update does a much better job making edits more seamlessly, and the models outputs are usable for whatever you want to use them for,” said Brichtova. AI image models have become a critical battle ground for Big Tech. When OpenAI launch...