Google Gemini is breaking out of ChatGPT’s shadow, likely on the wings of its Nano Banana image editor and the viral trend of AI-generated, lifelike figurines.
Google launched Nano Banana in late August. It hyped the model as a way to “transform images in amazing new ways” inside the Gemini app. To get the “perfect picture,” you simply pop an image into Gemini and “tell it what you’d like to change,” the company said. Google’s suggestions include redecorating your house, giving yourself a ’60s beehive, putting a tutu on your chihuahua, and seeing how many wrinkles you’ll have acquired in 10 years. You can also combine different pictures and create a “fun video” of your new reality by plugging the finished product back into Gemini.
On X, Gemini and Google Labs vice president Josh Woodward said the Gemini app had added 23 million users in the two weeks since the editing model launched. In the same time, he said Gemini has been used to transform 500 million images.
The surge has likely propelled Gemini to the top of various app stores around the world. At the time of writing, Gemini is the leading iPhone app on Apple’s App Stores in the US, UK, Canada, France, Australia, Germany, and Italy. In many cases, it reached the prime position by surpassing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which now sits in second place.
On September 11th, Woodward said “India has found” the image editor and later said that Google was going to have to implement “temporary limits” on usage in order to manage extreme demand. “It’s a full-on stampede to use” Gemini, he said, adding that the “team is doing heroics to keep the system up and running.”
So, what’s driving the surge? While a variety of edits have been popular, the runaway hit of Nano Banana has people turning themselves — or their pets — into 3D figurines. All you need to do is to give Gemini an image of yourself and some pretty detailed instructions to get a realistic miniature doll version of yourself on a desktop, complete with a box that it presumably came in and a wire-frame model presumably used to design it flashing on a computer screen behind it. While the prompt is detail-heavy, easily copied versions have spread online. Google has even supplied its own in order to keep the trend going.
After playing around with Nano Banana for a bit, it’s easy to see how Google has earned its viral AI moment. The image editor is simple and convenient to use inside the Gemini app. It’s also fast, with little of the waiting around for images that has turned me off other tools like ChatGPT. To be clear, there are still issues that frustrate me. Like other image apps, the results are not always what I imagined, and Gemini sometimes decided to just ignore my prompt entirely and return my image with no changes.
Despite my troubles, there is one element of Nano Banana’s editing capabilities that amused me enough to think it has earned its time in the spotlight and will likely spawn a few new viral trends before a better model takes its place: the images that it gave me still look like me. While many AI editing tools have been infuriating for their tendency to change facial features and create creepy facsimiles of the original, Google’s Nano Banana swiftly returned a cutesy desktop doll that was still quite recognizably me.