It’s hard to ignore the awesome power of AI these days. Whether it’s for work, planning something or just learning something new, AI seems to be able to make it happen faster than ever. Google’s Gemini has been given a recent powerful image editing update with an engine called Nano Banana. It hasn’t taken the members of the Irish public long to realise this is a great way to take the piss out of parents.
What is Google Gemini’s Nano Banana?
Nano Banana is a part of the Google Gemini app. When typing a prompt into Gemini, you’ll see an option with a banana emoji to activate it. Once activated, your image editing superpowers go to the next level.
Now, of course, Google offers this editing up for practical usage. They position this as a tool for editing people into photos that they’ve missed, or removing items from pictures and the likes. They want to give every member of the public the power of “Photoshop” in their own hands.
And that’s a powerful thing. I learned how to use Photoshop in college and immediately used it to edit images, both for college and for jokes and memes. The latter always attracted more attention, leaving many laughing and wondering how these images were being created.
The truth was it was taking me, well versed in Photoshop at the time, about 15 minutes to edit an image, something that Google Gemini can now do in seconds without you needing any training or practice.
It’s incredibly fast and now capable of mixing images from multiple sources to generate an incredible realistic edit.
So, just like I did back in college – you can use this for practical and sensible things, or to have a laugh. Plenty of people on TikTok are already leaning towards the latter.
TikTok Homeless Man Parents Prank
From the outset, I do have to say that I’m not overly comfortable with the “homeless” homeless element of this joke. As funny as it is, a part of this is a reference to people who are down on their luck, and that makes me sad. But then again – I have to remind myself that any “homeless people” in these pranks you see, aren’t actually real and are AI-generated!
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a number of Irish TikTokers posting videos where they have send a picture of a “homeless man” in the living room to their parents.
Of course, these pictures aren’t real. They’ve been edited by Google Gemini using Nano Banana.
The reactions from parents have been wildly varied. I’m going to start with an absolutely lovely example, though, where the mother that’s called is so chill, kind and helpful. We should all aspire to be as lovely as Aoife’s Mum. (Note, for some reason I can’t embed these).
Hannah’s mother is generally annoyed at her kids letting anyone into the house, full stop, regardless of their background.
The most Irish Mammy reaction of them all was posted by Nicole. There was two Mammies involved here, with the first being absolute gold.
AI Image Editing and the Future
I encourage you to check it out, not so much for Google’s sake, but so you can get a better understanding of what to look for in an AI-generated image.
These images would have all had the Gemini watermark in the bottom right corner, but this was cropped out to avoid ruining the prank. It also demonstrates how easily the image can be made, but also hidden to look real.
Whether for practical use or for pranks, the growing power of Gemini Nano Banana is nearly unfathomable. In just a few years, this technology has made seeing and believing two separate things completely. Understanding how images like this are edited and created is an increasingly important skill we should all have.
