It is once again time for another AI update! For all of you out of the loop, Google recently added something called Nano Banana to their Gemini AI, and it has been making waves across the world of digital design for the last week or so. It can take just about any image and do whatever you want with it, from swapping colors to removing people. It's not always successful, but the results are, frankly, insanely good sometimes.
The one good saving grace is its resolution limits. As with most AI, higher resolution requires far more compute. This makes it effectively useless for actual graphic design, but not for scams!
Something it apparently excels at to an almost comical level is creating fake anime style PVC figures of... anything. Ponies very much included.
So, consider this your next PSA on what to keep an eye out for to avoid getting scammed. Below I'll provide a bunch of examples as always. Stay safe out there!
There are some tells, particularly on the box art. The usual AI artifacts. You can prompt it without the box art though, which would make it even more challenging.
This one was surprising since it was based on an image that seemed like it wouldn't work at all.
And using a 3D model, like OpenPony, is even better. Sometimes it will flip things or even create new angles, so if you find the source of an image it wont even always be accurate as measure of authenticity.
The success rate is the really crazy part. Usually with AI stuff like this, you'd need to generate loads before you get anything even remotely accurate.
This Celestia here was one of the few major errors I ran into. Her tail and mane remained 2D and the box is too small.
The big thing to watch out for is, it can do just about any style you throw at it. This was just some random AI Luna i found on Google that it replicated and built an entirely new style and setting with.
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Another popen screenshot to show how it does with details. It even fixes a lot of the errors
As expected, this technology isn't stopping anytime soon. If you aren't careful and regularly use money on the internet, it's only going to get easier and easier to be scammed.
Etsy and Ebay are flooded with character merch using unlabeled AI images. Hell, my dad has an AI shirt and he had no idea was AI when he picked it up. There is 0 regulation for this stuff right now in the USA, so be extremely careful.
