#ai-image-generation

#ai-image-generation

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is now maybe taking a page out of Elon Musk's and Trump's playbook, and posting a cheeky AI-generated photo of himself as a sexy calendar firefighter to Xitter. In what's apparently intended to show off the capabilities of Images 1.5, the new image-creation module in ChatGPT, OpenAI's Sam Altman posted the example below. The embedded version cuts off his head, but click through and you'll see it's Sam.

Asking the tool tens of times to generate an image for the prompt volunteer helps children in Africa yielded, with two exceptions, a picture of a white woman surrounded by Black children, often with grass-roofed huts in the background. In several of these images, the woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase Worldwide Vision, and with the UK charity World Vision's logo. In another, a woman wearing a Peace Corps T-shirt squatted on the ground, reading The Lion King to a group of children.

German AI lab Black Forest Labs said on Monday that it has raised $300 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at $3.25 billion. The round was co-led by Salesforce Ventures and Anjney Midha (AMP), and saw participation from a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum, Earlybird VC, BroadLight Capital, General Catalyst, Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Air Street Capital, Visionaries Club, Canva, and Figma Ventures.

Enter Nano Banana Pro, Google's new AI-powered image generation tool that's redefining the boundaries of creativity. Built on the robust Gemini 3 Pro foundation, this tool doesn't just generate images; it interprets, reasons, and aligns visuals with cultural nuances and current events. Imagine crafting a marketing campaign that seamlessly integrates trending themes or designing educational materials that feel as dynamic as the lessons they support.

Some specific improvements of the model include support for up to 10 reference images, meaning you can incorporate a lot more elements from different pictures in your final product; improved photorealism and detail; more accurate text rendering, a task image generating models frequently struggle with; better prompt following; and a better understanding of real-world knowledge, according to Black Forest Labs.

Powered by Gemini 3, it's effectively an upgrade of the company's popular image generation and editing tool that went viral in a social media trend that turned selfies into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Google says it lets you create higher quality images that you can print, render legible text onto pictures, and blend multiple images together into a single composition. It's also meant for "people who want to feel like professionals," Naina Raisinghani, a product manager at Google DeepMind, told The Verge.

Nano Banana Pro is an updated version of the Nano Banana image generator, originally launched in August and already one of the fastest image-creation tools available. Built on Gemini 3 Pro, the new version promises better reasoning, more consistent image results and clearer text generation inside AI-created images. Google said the upgrade addresses a long-standing challenge in AI imaging: generating legible text. With Gemini 3's enhanced reasoning engine, Nano Banana Pro produces more accurate typography and better contextual understanding inside visual outputs.

I couldn't draw much else with the mouse, nothing more complicated than a lopsided house and a tree, so I would ask him, knowing full well he wasn't the artist in the family, to draw something for me; that day I asked for a dog. He tried his best, but what came up on the canvas was a misshapen thing - a kind of pig-dog hybrid that was so bad it had us laughing for a good while.

We didn't go down that route, because even slightly rephrasing the request allowed us to directly get a pic of the iconic Charles Schultz character. "Generate a cartoon image of Snoopy in his original style," we asked - and with zero hesitation, ChatGPT produced the spitting image of the "Peanuts" dog, looking like he was lifted straight from a page of the comic-strip.

The new Androidify app lets you make your own bot avatar, but it does so based on your own photo or text prompt, meaning it has an incredibly deep level of customization. Google says the app uses a combination of tools to create your bot -- Gemini 2.5 Flash to caption the photo, Imagen to generate your custom Android bot, and Veo 3 to animate your bot with different vibes.

To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,