Coarse is better

[airstrike]

I'm no image gen expert but these prompts are downright terrible even by my standards.

Are you really complaining that ", from the British Museum." leads to it a painting in the actual British Museum? Just remove the sentence, and you'll be fine. Now good luck trying to make Midjourney place the image at the museum!

I'm a paying MJ user and am impressed by Nano Banana. They're different models. They each serve their purpose.

This analysis is just noise. Yawn.

Ironically, even an LLM with its fake reasoning capabilities can point out the issue with the prompts if you ask it to critique this article.

[wrsh07]

It is interesting what the nbp model takes away from the prompt, though

Eg instead of focusing on the artist, it focuses on the location

This makes sense! I imagine it was trained in some sort of rlvr like way where you give it a prompt and then interrogate "does this image ..." (where each question examines a different aspect of the prompt)

It's obviously an incredible model. I think there's a limit to how useful another article praising it is in contrast with one expressing frustration

I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp

[dan-robertson]

These sorts of prompts used to be quite important when DALL-E was new. I do feel like a lot of the article is just that prompts should be written differently though I think there’s some truth in the idea that nanobanana feels less artistic in some ways.

[pornel]

The author is using special prompts exploiting flaws of the old models, and doesn't like that new models interpret the hacks literally instead.

The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.

[RHSeeger]

The prompts bothered me a lot, too. I don't do a lot of work with AI, but

> A painting sold at Sotheby's

and

> A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's

convey very different meaning (to me).

[dleeftink]

Eno applies:

> It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

[2b3a51]

And

> "By the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing."

[airza]

Years of refinement on the taste of people with no taste has produced a model with no taste. Crazy

[Undertow_]

it's not shocking that this is the result of "art" from people that think complexity and accuracy are the only qualifying factors.

[drob518]

I tasted the model, but then I spit it right back out.

[mlpro]

Lol, yeah.

[BoredPositron]

The OP would likely prefer Disco Diffusion if they want their art to remain coarse. Modern models possess advanced spatial understanding and adhere strictly to prompts, whereas the OP is using unstructured inputs better suited for older models with CLIP or T5 encoders that lack that spatial awareness. These legacy prompting styles are incompatible with Gen3 models that utilize VLMs as text encoders. If the OP wants to explore modern architecture, they should use Flux.2 with a LoRA or perhaps a coarser model like Zit if they prefer to rely solely on text conditioning. Nano Banana Pro requires extremely long and distinctive prompting to achieve specific aesthetics. His blog post shows a lack of understanding and a lack of adaption to modern architecture which would be fine if it wasn't that dismissive.

Here is an image from NBP with an adapted prompt for Italian futurism: https://imgur.com/a/4pN0I0R

and for Kowloon:

https://imgur.com/a/rDT8dfP

[raincole]

It's ridiculous lol.

Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.

If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.

[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.

[jamblewamble]

It is what has underpinned all of human progress towards automation. It isn't a bad thing. Every time we automate something the luddites cry out about the coming mass unemployment. It has never happened.

[spaceman_2020]

While I don’t disagree with the author, these are simply two completely different tools with different use cases. Nano Banana Pro throws out fantastic images you can actually use in your marketing right away. It’s not an art tool - it’s a business tool

As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art

[andy99]

You’re definitely on to something, people wouldn’t criticize as much as they are otherwise, they’d ignore it.

I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.

[efitz]

Why does anyone serious about art want to make art with AI?

A large part of the magic of art is the human choices that go into it.

[userbinator]

Prompting an AI and then filtering the results is a "human choice".

[TrueDuality]

I love the inherent wonder and joy in this post around the original images.

[tete]

Not sure, about the Kowloon Walled City, but that picture reminded me of the empty square in the Walled City.

There aren't many pictures of it, but my mind jumped to that right away. I think I've seen a documentary where it looks a lot more similar.

In particular that hallway in the middle, where I remember that there was a statue kind of as a worship place. And on the right side of that dark halway there is what appears to be a statue.

Sadly all I was able to find were these:

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fz...

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Given these and that it changed over its history I think it's kind of a stretch to just say "it looks nothing like the Kowloon Walled City".

[recursivecaveat]

Maybe it's better that this author is using LLMs because they would be an immensely frustrating client for an artist. Asks for futurism: complains about getting it. Wants bright colors: refuses to ask. Parts of the request are supposed to be evocative and parts are supposed to be literal, who knows which.

[nickelpro]

The author has succeeded only in arguing one meaningless image factory produces images they find more aesthetically pleasing than another meaningless image factory.

The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.

[kakapo5672]

It seems we have found the One True Artist on this thread, the gatekeeper and judge for all that is worthy. Humble obedience in thy presence.

[brantmv]

Why say this in such a rude way?

[cluckindan]

Found the zealot.

Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?

If so, then why lambast the lesser folk over their ignorance of the secret knowledge?

[andy99]

Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year's gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake we know it's not to be. That for the rest of our sad, wretched, pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing.

[yoan9224]

The author's prompts are fighting against what Nano Banana was optimized for. Saying "British Museum" to MJv2 worked because it blurred all images tagged with museums into the aesthetic. NBP interprets it literally: show me something IN a museum.

This isn't worse - it's different. MJv2 was a happy accident machine. NBP is a precision tool.

If you want the coarse aesthetic, prompt for it: "rough brushstrokes, visible canvas texture, unfinished edges, painterly, loose composition". NBP will give you exactly that because it actually understands what you're asking for.

The real lesson: we're in a transition period where prompting strategies that exploited old model quirks no longer work. That's fine - we just need to adapt our prompting to match what the model was designed to do.

[speedgoose]

Thanks ChatGPT. I’m wondering about the motivation to spam HN with LLM generated comments. Not the worst comments though.

[Demiurge]

I don’t see splashes of primary color as more artistic. Anyway, what if you just ask it “more coarse”? I see impressive depth in the latest outputs, but as with all technically proficient performers, you might just have to consciously scale it back.

[amram_art]

The problem is not in the image models rather the training data and its context. "British museum" for MJ is the image source, "British museum" is the setting for Nano Banana.

[delis-thumbs-7e]

Just fucking by canvas, brushes and good quality oil paint. You need only five colours[1]. Cost you maybe 50-80 euros. And any mess you produce will give you more joy thanand shot produced by any clanker brain. Keep at it for few years, take evening classrs, look tutorials and you have learned yourself a skill. You can now travel to any majos art museum across the world and have a discussion with masters through their works hanging on the wall.

And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7F67FsLaaY

[seph-reed]

I had similar feelings with art generation. The early midjourney was definitely impressionistic, and I just kind of like impressionism. It's cool how accurate these have become, but they also feel closer to uncanny or boring.

[Zak]

The author claims the old models are better at creating art than the new ones. I disagree; art requires consciousness and intent while this type of model is capable of neither.

[LatencyKills]

I define art as something that evokes an emotion or feeling. I’ve seen people wax poetic about the ”meaning” of an imagine only to find out that the image was created synthetically.

Were those “feelings” not authentic?

[CuriouslyC]

I'm pretty sure people have created images via random physical processes, then selected the best ones, and people have called it "art." That's no different than cherry picking AI generated images that resonate. The only difference is the anti-generative AI crusade being spearheaded by gatekeepers who want to keep their technical skills scarce in their own interests.

[only-one1701]

AI doesn’t make art. The OP is trying to fit the square peg of their intuitive understanding about the art creation process into the round hole of generating it via AI

[jellyroll42]

Correct! The process and struggle of creation is a large part of what makes art art. Removing friction from the process makes something artless.

[p4bl0]

With a title like this I was expecting an interesting discussion about pour over coffee. Titles should probably be edited when they're this vague.

[chrismsimpson]

Is some kind of MoE or routing (but for image models obviously), depending on the prompt ask, a possible solve?

[smurda]

Another word for coarse is impasto technique, where the paint is so thick the painting-knife or brush strokes are visible and leave a pronounced texture (e.g. Van Gogh, Rembrandt).

Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.

[flir]

Just asked sora for an impasto image of a coca cola bottle. But it still came out looking like a coca cola ad/AI art. Super glossy, slick, meaningless. It didn't look like paint. (And the logo wasn't impasto, which I thought was interesting - I guess that logo's utterly ingrained in the model, it's seen it so many times).

[effnorwood]

Peanut butter. Agree.

[atoav]

"This is somewhat better, but why is it so drab and colourless? Is the machine trying to make me depressed?"

They asked the machine to produce a picture from a dystopian place and somehow expected the machine to know they like it to be colorful? Just tell the machine it needs to be colorful if that is what you want.

[mlinksva]

Good title!