Stephen Downes

People have been expressing a lot of enthusiasm for the new Nano Banana image generator AI from Google. Here's Mike Caulfield, for example, with a nifty infographic from his 52 video walkthroughs of Critical Thinking with AI Mode. Here's a bunch more. You can make professional infographics with it. Now I've seen a bunch of these generated infographics and the technology is really impressive. But... what exactly is it representing? I thought I'd try with my 1,000 page manuscript on ethics and AI. I first loaded it into Gemini, thinking it was Nano Banana, and it created an interesting 'BANANA' acronym to represent the contents of the document, and does a pretty good job. Then I produced the image (view it here) and while it represents what I probably should have written to fit squarely into the mainstream (and the path to riches and fame) it completely misrepresents what I actually wrote. So there's more happening in Nano Banana than mere analysis of the documents being depicted as infographs. Much more.