Photo credit: Chris | Chatgpt21
Is a big tech company behind Nano Banana, the new AI image editor? This showed up on a benchmarking site and is already making waves because you can edit images with just a few words.
Nano Banana popped up on LMArena, a site where users pit AI models against each other in head-to-head tests. Unlike a typical product launch, this tool came with no press release or clear owner, it was shrouded in mystery. Users quickly noticed it could handle complex instructions like swapping backgrounds or adjusting lighting better than many others.
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🍌 Google's new image model, nano-banana, is the best I've seen.
It's the first one with good object persistence, notice how the beach wasn't altered at all and how well it followed the prompt. pic.twitter.com/x0h29HHDVG
— Mariano Pardo (@marian2js) August 20, 2025
Just tell it what you want in plain language—”add a neon city background” or “soften the lighting on the right”—and it will figure it out. No masks, no layers, no technical hurdles that get in the way of traditional editing. This is because of the sophisticated setup underneath the surface that combines language processing and image analysis to know exactly what needs to be changed and where. Early testing shows it can do multi-step edits in one pass, keeping things like lighting and perspective that other models often miss.
More Tests with Nano Banana 🍌🔥
Prompt: "create a 4-panel montage showing sporting moments. use the style of the reference image"
More examples (and prompts) in the thread … 👇 pic.twitter.com/hxvvapAwD8
— Marco (@ai_artworkgen) August 20, 2025
Rumors say Google is behind Nano Banana. Logan Kilpatrick, CEO of Google’s AI Studio, tweeted a banana emoji on X and fans went wild. Naina Raisinghani, product manager at Google DeepMind, followed with a reference to a famous piece of art: a banana taped to the wall. Google’s history of using the term “nano” for tiny, device-friendly models like the Gemini Nano fuels speculation.
Nano Banana is only available in LMArena’s “combat” mode where you can find it randomly or through select platforms like Flux AI and nano-banana.org which give you a taste of similar technology. No public API, no download, no release date. Some speculate it will interface with Google’s Gemini or Imagen suites and Google Workspace for mobile or laptop editing.
It messes up text rendering and can get confused by human features like hands, but it’s consistent throughout revisions – a character looks the same when changing poses or settings. Nano Banana is so smooth it’s almost scary – it could be used to make convincing fakes. To counter this Nano Banana apparently embeds invisible signals to identify AI-generated content, a response to the growing need for digital authenticity.
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