Nano Banana - quick go (scary!)

Fancy trying out the new Nano Banana image manipulation tool?

Well, originally I wasn't too bothered and then I tried it out with some images as starters and then got more creative with the prompts and was then actually very surprised at just how good it was at making fake imagery look really well done.

You can literally just fake and make any imagery / scene that you can think of just from a base image.

This is good, but, yes, can also be quite bad for obvious reasons - yes, there is a T&Cs violation restriction, however, it won't stop some weirdo getting hold of an online photo image of you and then including things in the image that were never there, like other people, etc... I'll show a few examples later, maybe.

However, as this guy on YouTube shows, it can really be useful if you're working with your own imagery and want to be more creative:

If you don't want to watch the video, I can give you a quick walk through of how to test out Nano Banana for free! Yes, I fell for signing up to several websites to get access and then got limited usage very quickly and then the demand to pay for more access.  However, there is a simpler way.

Go to lmarena.ai

Now, change the [Battle] at the top to [Direct Chat] and then at the bottom click on the [image] icon.

It should default to a Nano Banana preview model at the top and you're good to go!

Upload an image and ask a prompt, I did a few, one was a bit spooky, I uploaded an image of a female friend from a side-angle, only partly showing her face, I asked to create a front image and it did indeed create a similar likeness to the female friend.  I then used that AI generated image going forward, just as it was simpler and easier to use and I didn't want her image to be used for training or anything else on the internet.

Now the spooky part above is, I prompted for an "over the shoulder shot from behind the woman" - this image looks so realistic but never happened, it's not real, but could have been.

I refreshed and was presented with this output:

okay, that was all a bit INCEPTION based, but it does show how the creative elements have come into play from such a simple prompt.  Again, I'd just like to stress, these images are fake, the tooling has never seen this person from this angle before, it has generated the hair style based off the limited imagery it had in the original image.  Looks a bit too realistic.

Right, enough of all that, before I get into trouble - where are some photographs of myself that I can use as examples!???!

Always a tough question to answer :-)

Here's a dorky image of myself (looking rough as usual), let's see how we can manipulate this in weird and wonderful ways?!!

SPOOKY!

It did a reasonable job from the prompt request, I asked to show the shot from behind me and to make it night time - it took the small logo from the front of my T-shirt and made it into a similar big logo on the back, it kind of made an attempt to guess what my hair was going to be like - okay, I'll take that lack of grey! even got the wrist bands in place and an attempt at the tattoo, need to firm up my butt cheeks a bit more though (they are fake!) and it darkened the sky and gave a moon.  Again, all fake, but quite impressive!

Okay, went for a slightly different prompt:

OMFG! That is spooky.  

Now compare that image with a REAL one that the tool has NEVER seen before?! I'm going to post it here, this is the first time ever on the internet, look at how scarily real the above fake image is against the following that IS real.

Okay, I look slimmer and less crumpled in the fake image, but it is quite scary how fake images of myself could start to appear online and I would not be able to argue / convince anyone they weren't really real.

Okay, let's try adding things into the fake image now!

okay, I'm going to stop now as I just freaked myself out - that could pass for me there, if you didn't 100% know me or just saw at a glance or from a distance, that would be passable to think that actually was me!

Okay, so I couldn't resist one last go:

Whilst this is not 100% "business" usage, it is still very useful if you are having to create or generate images for an article or a website or something of that nature or even just for some idle fun, like I just did! 

You'll get about 10-12 attempts at uploading an image, asking a prompt to get a generated image, possibly refreshing the output a few times, just to see, then you'll hit a fair usage limit and will be stopped from using it for 50 minutes.

Here's the shhhhh moment. If you open up an Incognito mode tab, it doesn't have a restriction, so you can keep playing for a lot longer - but shhhh about it, otherwise, they'll force a sign-up policy or restrict it in some other way and I'll have to find another way to test this out!