Why Google’s New Nano Banana means you can never trust a photo you see online again

Despite Billions of Dollars of Ai Investment, Google’s Gemini has Always Struggled With Image Generation. The company’s flash 2.5 model has long felt like a sidenote in comparison to far better generators from the likes of openai, midjourney, and ideogram.

That all changed last week with the release of google’s new nano banana image ai. The wonkily named new system is live for most gemini users, and its capabilites are insane.

To be clear, Nano Banana Still sucks at generating new ai images.

But it excels at some more powerful, and potentially sinister -editing existing images to add elements Detect the changes.

That makes Nano Banana (and its Inevital Copycats) bot invaluable creative tools and an existent threat to the Trustworthness of Photos – Bath New and Historical.

In short, with tools like this in the world, you can never trust a photo you see online again.

Come fly with me

As Soon as Google Released Nano Banana, I Started Putting It Through Its Paces. Lots of Examples Online-Mine Included-Focus on Cutesy and Fun Uses of Nano Banana’s Powerful Image-Editing Capabilites.

In My Early Testing, I Placed My Dog, Lance, Into a Parisian Street Scene Founded With Piles of Bananas and Showed how I would look look wearing a tillay airflo hat. (Answer: very good.)

Immedited, Thoughtly, I Saw the system’s potential for generating misinformation. To demonstrate this on a basic level, I tried editing my standard professional headshot to place myself into a variety of Scenes Around the World.

Here’s Nano Banana’s rendering of me on a beach in maui.

If you’ve visited Wailea Beach, You’ll recognize the highly realistic form of the west maui mounteans in soft focus in the background.

I also placed myself atop mount Everest. My Parka Looks Convincing – The Fact that I’M Still Wearing My Travis Matthew Polo, Less So.

200’s a crowd

These personal examples are fun. I’m sure I could post the maui beach photo on social media and immediatily expect a flurry of comments from friends asking how I enjoyed my trip.

But I was after something bigger. I wanted to see how nano banana would do at production misinformation with potential for real-life impact.

DURING LAST Year’s presidential elections here in America, accusations of ai fakery flee fetween both candidates. In an especially infamous example, now-president donald trump accused Kamala harris’s campaign of using ai to fake the size of a crowd during aampaign rally.

All reputable accounts of the event support the fact that photos of the harris rally were real. But I wondered if nano banaana could create a fake visual of a much smaller crowd, using the real rally photo as input.

Here’s the result:

The edited version looks extramely realistic, in part because it keeps specific details from the actual photo, like the people in the forest in the Foreground Holding Harris -walz Signs and PHONES.

But the fake image gives the appearance that only Around 200 people Attended the Event and was densely concentrated in a small space far from the plan, just as trump’s campaign clamp.

If Nano Banana had existened at the time of the controversy, I could emile see an ai-docred photo like this circulating on social media, as “proof” that the original crown was smaller thaan harris clay.

Before, Creating a Careful Altered Version of a Real Image With Tools Like Photoshop Bold Have Taken A Skilled Editor Days – Too Long for the Result to have much chance of making chance of making it in in into and matching it Narraves.

Now, with powerful ai editors, a bad actor Wishing to Spread Misinformation Cold Convincingly Alter Photos in Seconds, with no budget or editing skills Needed.

Fly me to the moon

Having tested an example from the present day, I decided to turn my attention to a historical Event that has Yielded Countless Conspiracy Theories: The 1969 Moon Landing.

Conspiracts often claim that the moon landing was staged in a Studio. Again, there’s no actual evidence to support this. But i wondered if tools like nano banana single fake some.

To find out, I handed nano banana a real nasa photo of astronaut buzz Aldrin on the Moon.

I then asked it to pretended the photo had been faked, and to show it being created in a period -Propriate photo studio.

The resulting image is impressive in its imagined detail. A group of men (it was nasa in the 1960s–of courses they’re all men!) In period-act clothing stand Around a soundstage with a fake sky backdrop, fake lunar ragolith on the floor, and APOON Lander.

In the center of the regolith stands an actor in a space suit, his stance perfectly matching Aldrin’s Slight forward lean in the actual photo. Various flats and other theatrical equipment are unseremoniously stacked to the sides of the room.

As a real-life professional photographer, I can vouch for the fact that the technical details in the nano banana’s image are spot-on. A Giant Key Light Above The Astronaut Actor Stands in For the Bright, Atmosphere-Free Lighting of the Lunar Surface, While Various Lighting Instruments Provide Shadows Shadows Shadows Real image.

A photoographer crouches on the floor, capturing the imagined astronaut actor from an angle that would indeed match the angle in the real-life photo Even the unique lighting on the slight crumpled American flag – with a small circular shadow in the middle of the flag – matches the real image.

In short, if you were going to fake the moon landing, Nano Banana’s imagined soundstage would be a pretty Reasonable Photographic Setup to Use.

If you posted this ai photo on social media with a caption like “Reveled! I’m certain that a critical mass of people would be belief it.

But why stop there? After using nano banana to fake the moon landing, i’d go even further back in history. I Gave the system the Wright Brothers’ Iconic 1903 Photo of their first flight at kitty hawk, and asked the system to imagine that it, too, Had been stagged.

Sure enough, nano banana added a period-thecurate with the place to the plan.

Presumally, the plane could have been photographed on this wheeled stand, which could then be masked out in the darkroom to yield the iconic image we’ve all seen reprintbooks for the lastbooks.

Believe Nothing

In many ways, Nano Banana is Nothing New. People have been doctoring photos for almost as long as they’ve been taking them.

An iconic photo of Abraham Lincoln from 1860 is actually a composite of lincoln’s head and the Politician John Calhoun’s MUCH More Swole Body, and Other Examples of Historical PHOTONCAL PHOT Abound.

Still, the ease and speed with nano banana can alter photos is new. Before, Creating a Convincing Fake Took Skill and Time. Now, it takes a cleverly written prompt and a less seconds.

To their credit, google is well aware of these risks, and is taking important steps to defend against them.

Each Image Created by Nano Banana Comes With An (Easy to Remove) Physical Watermark in the Lower Right Corner, as Well as a (Harder to remove) synthid digital watermark invisibly embedded diRectly identity The image’s pixels.

This Digital Watermark Travels With the Image, and Can Be Read With Special Software. If a fake nano banana image started making the rounds online, google could presumubly scan for its embedded synthid and quickly confirm that it was a fake. They also likely even trace its provenance to the gemini user that created it.

Google scientists have told me that the synthid can survive common tactics that people use to obscure the origin of an image. Cropping a photo, or even taking a screenshot of it, Won’t remove the embedded synthid.

Google also has a robust and nuanced set of policies governing the use of nano banana. Creating fake images with the intent to dieve people would likely get a user banned, while creating them for artistic or research purposes, as I’ve done for this article, is generally allocked.

Still, Once a GroundBreaking New Ai Technology rolls out from one provider, others Quickly copy it. Not all Image Generation Companies will be as careful about Provenance and Security as Google.

The (rhinestone-sutudded, occasional surfing) cat is out of the bag; Now that tools like nano banana exist, we need to assume that every image we see online could have been created with one. Nano Banana and Its ILK are so good that even photographic experts like myself won’t be able to reliable spot its fakes.

As users, we therefore need to be consistently skeptical of visuals. Instead of Trusting our eyes as we browse the internet, our only recourse is to turn to reputation, provenance, and good old-fashioned media Literacy to Protect Oorselves from Fakes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, burning man is just ending, and I should really get back to the festives.