David (00:00)
All right. So, okay. So here we go. I'll get this go. This thing needs a lot of rerolls, unfortunately.

Ilan (00:06)
Welcome to prompt and circumstance. I'm Ilan And today we're gonna be diving in to the nano banana craze.

David (00:09)
And I'm David.

Ilan (00:28)
All right, on today's Nano Banana Bonanza, we'll be talking to you about what is this model? Why is it getting so much hype out there on the internet? And then David will take us through a real example of how he used this tool for an image for our podcast.

David (00:51)
Yeah, and then we'll also talk about how you can use it in a business setting as well.

Ilan (00:56)
That's right, so not just creating cool memes to post on Instagram. All right, David, so why don't you kick us off here?

Ilan (01:05)
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You can try it too. Just go to querio.ai and let them know David and Ilan sent you for two months free

David (01:39)
All right, so for those who don't know what Nano Banana is, it is the most recent image generating AI model offered by Google.

Okay, so the name Nano Banana came about because that was a code name that they were using when they were testing this model on LMArena.

And everybody loved it because it was just that much more powerful in certain use cases. But the actual technical name for the model is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. I like my Nano Banana better.

Ilan (02:09)
Wow, Google's, yeah,

Google adhering to their terrible naming schemes.

David (02:15)
Yeah, yeah, it's

Ilan (02:16)
All right. So David, there's been a ton of hype around nano banana since it came out a few weeks ago. ⁓ so can you tell us more about that?

David (02:26)
Yeah. So one of the ⁓ special things about Nano Banana is that it's able to maintain the identity of the person very well. So if you were to upload an image of yourself, you could do lots of things with that image, like put on different clothes. You could try out different clothes.

You could go to a website and, ⁓ you know, look at their catalog and you say, Hey, that item looks really interesting. I'd like that. I'm going to try it on virtually. And so you maybe grab that image, throw it into Nano Banana and it'll generate an image of you wearing that clothing.

Ilan (03:06)
So you'll see me in lots of $5,000 suits.

David (03:10)
Just like in real life, right? Isn't that how it works?

So it's got to the level where there is news coverage of people doing certain things with this model. So here's an article from the Hindustan times talking about how ⁓ generating an image of oneself wearing a saree is becoming a thing. Specifically one with a vintage Bollywood look. ⁓ So

Ilan (03:36)
I also

went with the vintage Bollywood look.

David (03:39)
You also did, right?

Ilan (03:41)
Maybe that'll be our LinkedIn post for this episode.

David (03:44)
Yeah, yeah, we're gonna have ourselves in a vintage Bollywood thumbnail.

Ilan (03:50)
Mm-hmm.

David (03:51)
All right. So I took what I had learned about Nano Banana and applied it to our podcast where I made this thumbnail for our previous episode where, you know, you're seeing ⁓ images of people who look a lot like Satya and Sam Altman and Amodei ⁓ in a meme, right? The distracted boyfriend meme. And so...

Why don't I walk you through how I made this in Nano Banana?

Ilan (04:21)
Yeah, please.

David (04:22)
All right. So first off, let's get to Nano Banana. So the way that you get there is you go to aistudio.google.com and you're gonna land on this page here. And you'll see that there's a new button for trying Nano Banana. Let's go there. And here you can then type in your prompt and as well upload images.

Ilan AI (04:42)
Okay, so you're going to show us how we got our title card last week.

David (04:45)
And so what I need to do is first get the clothing that they're wearing and put them onto our our cast, right? So what I'm to do is take this image and I'm going to ask it to

Provide the clothing that the man is wearing laid out on a white background.

Now one good thing about Nano Banana is that it is quite fast. So this ⁓ image getting generated is only going to take a few seconds.

Ilan (05:13)
which is a huge improvement from some of the models we've seen in the past.

David (05:18)
That's right. So here we have the clothing that the man presumably was wearing, a pretty good extraction from that image. So let's go ahead and save this.

All right, so I'm going to upload an image of Satya and the clothing that was extracted. And I'm going to tell the model to make him wear it.

Ilan (05:36)
Now, one thing I'm noticing here is that you have not had to provide a lengthy prompt, which was typical of most image generating models up till now to get a decent result. You have to be very, very specific about exactly what you want it to have happen. ⁓ with nano banana, can just prompt in, pretty much natural language. ⁓ you know, this is like one sentence.

David (06:05)
Yeah, exactly. ⁓ It is what makes it very accessible, I'd imagine. I think this is why it's really got to the level of fame that it has. There are certain terms that you would want to know, like a three-quarter body shot. I'm not sure that everybody knows what that is, but I'm sure that once you hear that term, you know what it means. So let's see how it goes.

Ilan (06:31)
Hey, look at that.

David (06:33)
Alright, so we've got Satya wearing the same clothes as the guy in the meme. Look at that. Pretty good.

Ilan (06:40)
That's awesome.

David (06:41)
Alright, so I'm going to download this and I'm going to repeat this workflow with the other two people.

Okay. So I've done the same workflow with the other two people in the shot. So I've got Sam Altman here in the, in the blue top and, uh, Dario here in the red. And what I've also done is I've taken that meme image. Uh, I've thrown it into, uh, an LLM and asked it to provide a description

of the scene. So I don't need to type it out of what they need to do. I've also named the files figure one, figure two and figure three. This way the reference is ⁓ corresponding to the prompt. All right, let's go.

Ilan (07:20)
Gotta say, Dario looks great in that red dress.

David (07:23)
He looks really happy in that.

Okay, so, all right, here's what we ended up with. ⁓ We ended up with ⁓ something similar to the meme, but we've got ⁓ Satya in the wrong spot here. We got somebody who looks like Dario without his glasses. Not quite right. Here's the thing about Nano Banana is that you can easily reroll. There is this button here when you mouse over.

You just click on this to rerun and it'll do that run all over again.

Okay, so with our second reroll and a modified prompt where we're asking them to keep the identities the same and being clear as to who figure one, two, and three refers to, we got something a little bit better, right? So we've got Satya in the right position looking at Amodei, ⁓ but Sam Altman is gone. So we're getting there.

Ilan (08:18)
So it seems like Nano Banana may also have some hallucination or lack of understanding problems that you see in other tools.

David (08:30)
Yeah, yeah, I'm very sure that that's why they had the rerun button added to it. There is ⁓ some variability in its output. Hey, hey, this one's not bad. Look, it's ⁓ it's a development, trying to stop Satya from, ⁓ from maybe going over to talk to Amodei. So pretty close. I think we all get what the flow ⁓ would be. And I think, you know, to be able to create something like this.

you know, even just last year would have been darn near impossible.

Ilan (09:05)
So David, do you have any tips that you found from trying to replicate that meme that you think sped your

David (09:15)
Yeah. So here's some important things you should know. First, do it one step at a time. Right? So instead of saying, Hey, take these three people, change their clothes to these things and put them into this situation. Do it one step at a time. Hey, with this individual, put them on into this clothing or, you know, even, ⁓ you know, that, that step where you're extracting the clothing first and then in a separate generation, you then put it on, right?

⁓ that's, that's one thing. ⁓ the other is that, ⁓ the more people who are involved in a single scene that you want to keep consistent, the more Nano Banana will struggle. It seems to have, ⁓ I suppose a limited context window when it comes to understanding the identities of the people involved. So here, when we have three people, it ends up being, ⁓ a lot more difficult for Nano Banana than with two people.

Ilan (10:00)
Mm-hmm.

Got it. ⁓ So basically, LLMs still can't count and Nano Banana is really powerful, but also requires you to break down what you're trying to do into small manageable steps in order to get to a result.

David (10:31)
Yeah, that's right. Now what helped me a lot during my investigation into Nano Banana was ⁓ this repo. This is a collection of example use cases for Nano Banana. There are, as of mid September, there are 91 examples of what you can do. So, you what I showed you was just one simple use case. Here's a really cool one.

where you provide it with a map and then you give it an arrow and you say, show me ⁓ the view from the viewpoint of the arrow and it'll do a decent job of generating that image. So it has ⁓ a good amount of power behind it that I think a lot of people are just learning about. back there.

Ilan (11:17)
Wow.

This is

an awesome tool, David, that you've shared here. And I think a lot of the times when we think about LLMs, part of the struggle is just learning how to access the power that they have. so resources like this are really vital for getting people over the learning curve or getting people above the first step of understanding

how to use the tool. So that's an awesome resource. We'll link it in the show notes.

David (11:57)
Yeah, that's right. And,

and we will put it in the show notes.

All right, so that is just a preview of what Nano Banana can do. Let's talk a little bit about how we can use this in, let's say business, rather than creating funny memes. You know, I recently used this ⁓ in a slide deck where in a conference presentation, ⁓ I previously would have used maybe some stock photos to communicate ⁓ an idea.

Ilan (12:23)
Mm-hmm.

David (12:26)
⁓ whereas, ⁓ what I did instead was I generated an image using Imagen, ⁓ and then I modified it using nano banana. ⁓ so the image that Imagen and created was, you know, say somebody like looking at their, at their phone and like, you know, not so happy about it. That's the problem I wanted to communicate. ⁓ and it wasn't just exactly right. And so to tweak it, I threw that image into nano banana and I said, make this change.

make that change, put them into this setting instead. And it worked quite well.

Ilan (13:01)
Yeah, that's very cool. I had a similar experience ⁓ last week when I had to put together a roadmap presentation for our executive team. And for the title slide, I wanted something that communicated the busyness of the holiday season for our ⁓ industry. And so I used Nano Banana to...

create an image out of a prompt, ⁓ which was based off of a number of e-boy images. If you don't know what those are, we'll link some of those in the notes. But they're these very busy kind of ⁓ retro 8-bit images that were popular in the 2000s. And so use those as the starting point. And it generated something really great, showing

kind of the North Pole and packages moving out of there and planes flying around the world and all these different operations that I specified in my prompt.

David (14:06)
Yeah, that's awesome. One of the things that I discovered is that these image generating tools, ⁓ you can get specific with the things that you tell it to do, such as I want a Ford F-150 and it'll generate an image of that specifically. So, you if you're naming an aircraft, could say, I want specifically an A220 for example. Yeah.

Ilan (14:21)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

It's really powerful, really cool. And I do think that beyond slide decks, I expect that more marketing images or even in-app images are going to be ⁓ generated in this way so that you can get exactly what you're looking for without having to pay through the nose for an animator or a designer to make that for you.

David (14:55)
Yeah, yeah, it really helps to speed things up and also reduce the cost. And to that, to that end, I was thinking about a mock-up that I had made, just a rough one where I took an existing screenshot of our application. just, and I said, Hey, add, add like a notification bell as well. That's what it was to, to the screen. And it's like, okay, like it, looks pretty good. It put it into the right spot. It made it look correctly sized correctly. I didn't need to, you know, go find some clip art or whatever and move it in myself.

Ilan (15:12)
Mm-hmm.

David (15:24)
it was quite fast, quite good

Ilan (15:28)
That's awesome. Well, with that, that was our episode on Nano Banana. What have you used Nano Banana for? Let us know in the comments. Otherwise, you can like and subscribe. You can find us on all the socials at @pandcpodcast and we'll see you next week.

David (15:46)
See you next time.