Gemini’s refusal to make anything but 1:1 square images is driving us crazy

If you’ve used modern AI chatbots enough, this probably is going to sound very familiar: You construct a prompt containing one or more very specific restrictions, and then watch as the result you get just utterly ignores those limitations.

I recently had just such an experience, trying to use Gemini to cheat at Blue Prince solve some word puzzles, and even when directing that I wanted only 6-letter answers, still got a bunch of 7- and 8-letter responses. Normally, when you point this out to an AI system, it revises its output accordingly, eventually giving you want you wanted in the first place. But what’s currently going on with Gemini and image generation is proving to be nothing short of maddening.

Gemini got a big upgrade when it comes to creating and editing images a few weeks back with Nano Banana, and it’s definitely very impressive. But right around the same time, it seems, Gemini has started getting awfully fussy about the shape of the pictures it generates.

Google’s image synthesis tools have long defaulted to making pictures with a square (1:1) aspect ratio. In the past, though, we’ve been able to successfully steer that in other directions — namely widescreen (16:9) output — just by telling the system that’s what we wanted.

Since some point last month, though, Gemini has stopped listening to our requests for anything other than 1:1 images. Actually, no — that would be bad enough — what we’re getting is somehow even worse. Gemini is telling us that it understands what we want, and then giving us something else entirely.

Here, I asked Gemini for a charcoal sketch-style drawing of a Bugdroid in 1950s Paris in a 16:9 wide aspect ratio. What I got was square 1:1 output. But maybe the biggest failure is in how Gemini reacts to attempts to correct that:

Come on. If you’re not pulling your hair out at this point, you have far more patience than us.

When we phrase things just right, at least, we’re able to get what feels like a little more insight into what’s going on here:

On one hand, it’s still very frustrating that Gemini seems to be aware (as “aware” as an AI ghost in the machine can be, at least) that there’s something broken on Google’s end, and isn’t just telling users about this current restriction when they request 16:9 images in the first place. But at least we seem to be getting closer to some semblance of an explanation.

Digging around social media and support forums, we see that we’re far from alone with this experience, and the best news there is that Google has been responding to these reports with assurances that 1) this is not intended behavior and 2) a fix is in the works:

That was nearly a week ago, though, so we probably shouldn’t be holding our breath at this point for an immediate solution. The silver lining may be that you have your choice of options when it comes to work-arounds. You could always manually crop down one of these square images to a (lower-res) wide version — Gemini even offered this advice to us at one point. But even then, you’re starting with content that was intended to fill a certain frame, and risk cropping out important details.

Maybe the more useful hack is starting by uploading a blank white image in your desired aspect ratio — that way, Gemini effectively “fills it in” and has the correct aspect ratio to begin with. And this has the benefit of creating images that look intentionally framed for this shape.

Right now, that’s probably your best option. Hopefully, we don’t have to keep jumping through hoops like that for much longer, though, and Gemini goes back to actually giving us what we ask for.