I spent the weekend comparing Gemini’s new Nano Banana image tool to ChatGPT – and there’s one clear winner

At least as far as I’m concerned, ChatGPT has been ruling the roost for image generation in AI ever since its native image generation capabilities were added in March this year, sparking all sorts of viral image crazes, like the Studio Ghibili one, for example.

Since then Google has taken a bit of a step back, but has been slowly working on its own rival, called Nano Banana. Last week it added its new image editor to Gemini and made it available to everybody, and now I think it has become my favourite image editor, even over ChatGPT. Here’s why.

One banana, two banana

Apparently the name Nano Banana was the anonymous codename for Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model during its testing phase on the LMArena leaderboard, and over time it stuck.