Is a Tech Giant Behind Mysterious AI Image Generator That is ‘Cooking Photoshop?’
There is a powerful new AI image generator making lots of noise among text-to-image enthusiasts, with many people wondering if it is a threat to Adobe Photoshop.
Nano Banana is a mysterious AI model that is currently only available on LMArena, a benchmarking website that lets users rank competing AI models. Its quiet appearance on the site has caused a stir amid rumors that a giant tech firm may be behind it.
Nano banana is genuinely blowing my mind.
“Add a third bag of dog food in the cart the same as the other two”
It’s disturbingly good. Photoshop might be cooked this decade forever. pic.twitter.com/vC8x0lSOmk
— Chris (@chatgpt21) August 19, 2025
🍌 Google's new image model, nano-banana, is the best I've seen.
It's the first one with good object persistence, notice how the beach wasn't altered at all and how well it followed the prompt. pic.twitter.com/x0h29HHDVG
— Mariano Pardo (@marian2js) August 20, 2025
More Tests with Nano Banana 🍌🔥
Prompt: "create a 4-panel montage showing sporting moments. use the style of the reference image"
More examples (and prompts) in the thread … 👇 pic.twitter.com/hxvvapAwD8
— Marco (@ai_artworkgen) August 20, 2025
Now I’m testing Nano Banana with product replacement. even with product photos that have complex patterns nano banana can still match them perfectly. On average it only takes me 2–3 tries to get a solid result. Well played
base image : @letz_ai pic.twitter.com/UpEdhMOQkF
— DStudioproject (@D_studioproject) August 20, 2025
The examples shared by folks on social media look impressive. Reddit users have praised it for being “the first image generator that can do image consistency with real photos.” But who or what is behind it?
Rumor Mill
Internet sleuths believe Google is the tech giant behind Nano Banana after Logan Kilpatrick, head of product for Google AI Studio, tweeted a single banana emoji on X on Tuesday. Naina Raisinghani, product manager at Google DeepMind, retweeted Kilpatrick’s post with her own picture of a banana. Google didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
The evidence seems strong, but if it is Google then the model will likely get a name change before it is released. Remember, it wasn’t long ago that Google shifted the goalposts with its Veo 3 AI video model.
Should Adobe Be Worried?
Online accounts and websites including Creative Bloq have speculated whether technology like this could eat into Adobe Photoshop’s stranglehold on the photo editing market. While it is undoubtedly impressive that an AI model can deftly composite separate photos together, Photoshop is used for so much more than just compositing layers.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
