After seeing all the banana-fanfare for Google's newest generative AI tool, I knew I had to take it for a spin. Named Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, the model upgrades your ability to edit your photos natively in Gemini. AI enthusiasts have referred to it as the "nano bananas" model, spurred on by a series of banana-themed teasers from Google execs.
In the few weeks it's been out, people have created over 200 million AI images, and over 10 million people have signed up to use the Gemini app, according to Josh Woodward, Google's vice president of Google Labs and Gemini.
Google has invested heavily in its generative media models this year, dropping updated versions of its image and video generator models at its annual I/O developers conference. Google's AI video generator Veo 3 stunned with synchronized audio, a first among the AI giants. And creators have made more than 100 million AI videos with Google's AI filmmaker tool, Flow.
I've spent a lot of time testing AI creative software, and I was excited to see what Google had cooked up. But my testing of 2.5 Flash Image showed that just because something has a flashy entrance doesn't mean it'll always lives up to its hype. Here's how my experience with Gemini nano bananas went: the good, the bad and the frustrating.
What worked
The Gemini bananas model is spookily good at adding elements to existing images, blending AI-generated elements well into any picture you snapped. It also maintains a decently stable level of character consistency -- meaning the people in my photos weren't too distorted or wonky after going through the AI processing. Those are both important distinctions for AI image programs, and something Google said it had worked to improve.
You can see both of these characteristics in this picture of my sister and me. Our general appearances are unchanged in the edited version (right), showing off that character consistency. I asked Gemini to add a third sister who looked similar to the two of us, which it did scarily well by adding a third woman in between the two of us.
Welcome to the family, scarily accurate-looking AI sister. Katelyn Chedraoui/Gemini
I was also pretty impressed with how quickly Gemini could spit out completed images. Anywhere under a minute gets a gold star from me, and Gemini was regularly handling requests in under 15 seconds. I also appreciated how it added a watermark to all the images it created and edited -- even if I don't love how tech companies have corrupted the sparkles emoji for AI, it's extremely important to have some markers of AI-generated content. Google's SynthID and behind-the-scenes work also help differentiate AI content from human-created imagery.
Gemini is good at wholesale AI image creation, too, but I recommend using its Imagen 4 or another AI image generator instead -- they have more hands-on controls and settings that get you closer to what you want with less work.
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