An explainer on the amazing new world of AI-generated art and a peek into the future of creativity.
Welcome back to our “Tech Explainer” series, where we demystify the modern technologies you might hear about in the news or from your family. In our last couple of sessions, we’ve talked about practical tools you can use today. This week, let’s take a little peek into the future.
Have you ever wished you could create any picture you could possibly imagine, just by describing it in words? What if you could tell a computer, “Show me a photo of a polar bear reading a book in a comfortable armchair,” and it could create it for you instantly? This might sound like science fiction, but it’s a technology called AI Image Generation, and it’s one of the most rapidly evolving and fascinating areas in the tech world. Today, let’s explore how it works and look at one particular tool made by Google called “Nano Banana”.
(A special thanks to one of our readers, Phil, who sent this topic in! Please send me ideas for other topics you’d like me to write about).
Tech Explainer #3: AI Art and the Magic of ‘Nano Banana’
So, What is AI Image Generation? The Big Idea
Imagine an artist who has spent their entire life studying every painting, photograph, and drawing ever created. They’ve learned the style of every great master and the shape of every object in the world. Now, imagine you could whisper a detailed idea in this artist’s ear, and they could paint that original masterpiece for you in seconds. In a nutshell, that’s an AI image generator.
Scientists “train” these powerful computer programs by showing them billions of images from the internet, along with their text descriptions. The AI learns the complex connections between words (like “fluffy,” “dog,” “ocean,” “sunset”) and the arrangements of pixels that make up those images. When you give it a text command, called a “prompt,” it uses that vast knowledge to “dream up” and create a brand new, original image from scratch.
Introducing “Nano Banana”
There are already several services that can do this, but to really understand the potential, let’s look at Google’s new image generation product called “Nano Banana.”
What makes a tool like Nano Banana so special isn’t just its ability to create a picture from a prompt, but its incredible editing abilities. It doesn’t just create one final image; it acts like a magical photo editing studio, allowing you to change, expand, and perfect your creation with simple words and gestures.
Let’s See It In Action
Let’s imagine we’re sitting in front of Nano Banana and want to create a fun, whimsical piece of art.
Step 1: The First Idea. We start by typing a simple prompt:
“A realistic photo of a classic red convertible driving on a sunny, winding coastal highway.”
In seconds, a beautiful photo appears on the screen, looking just like a real photograph.
Step 2: The First Edit. It’s nice, but let’s make it more fun. We circle the red car with our finger on the screen and type a new command for just that area:
“Change the car to a charming yellow submarine.”
Instantly, Nano Banana seamlessly replaces the car with a yellow submarine, perfectly integrating it onto the road with realistic lighting and shadows, as if it were always there.
Step 3: The Final Touch. We love our scene, but now we want to give it a specific artistic feel. We type one last command for the whole image:
“Make the whole image in the style of a 1960s travel poster.”
The entire scene: submarine, road, the coastline, is instantly transformed into a beautiful, stylized work of art with the vintage colors, textures, and fonts of a classic travel advertisement. With just a few simple English commands, we’ve gone from a basic idea to a complex, original piece of art.
Quick Tech Tip
The key to getting a great result from any AI image generator is the “prompt.” The more descriptive and detailed your text prompt is, the closer the AI can get to the image you have in your head. Instead of just typing “a cat,” try being more descriptive: “a fluffy orange tabby cat with green eyes, sleeping in a sunbeam on a dark wooden floor, photorealistic style.”
Tech Term Demystified: ‘Nano Banana’
The “Nano” part of the name refers to the incredible precision of the technology. “Nano” comes from the word “nanometer,” a measurement that is almost unimaginably small. It signifies that this AI allows for edits that are precise down to the tiniest pixel, letting you change the smallest details of an image with perfect accuracy, almost at a molecular level.
I’ve seen a couple different stories on why it’s called Banana, but this one makes the most sense to me. The “Banana” part is more playful, which is common for internal project codenames at a creative company like Google. The story goes that the engineers started calling it that because the powerful editing process felt like you could “peel back” the layers of an image to change what was underneath, just like peeling a banana. You can remove the “peel” (an object, a person, or the sky) to reveal or create something entirely new underneath without disturbing the rest of the image. The name was so simple and memorable that it stuck!
Good News Byte
Generative AI is showing incredible promise in the fields of science and medicine. Scientists are using it to design brand-new proteins that could be used in life-saving drugs, and medical researchers are using it to generate synthetic medical images (like X-rays or MRI scans) to train other AI systems to detect diseases earlier and more accurately, all without needing to use real patient data.
Did You Know?
In 2018, a portrait created entirely by an AI was sold at the famous art auction house Christie’s for an astonishing $432,500. The artwork, titled “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,” was one of the first major instances of AI-generated art being treated as a serious piece in the fine art world, sparking a global conversation about the nature of art and creativity.
