"At a spot on South 7th St. in St. Louis stand two buildings that could not be more different. On the west side of the street, the massive spire and nave of Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church rise to evoke the wonder and power of God. Across 7th, squat and efficient, there's a Dollar Tree. The national discount retail chain meets many wants and needs, but spiritual growth isn't one of them."
"The image of this grand church and the Dollar Tree lingered with me but I did nothing with it until I tested Google Gemini's Nano Banana image generator. Like all these AI image tools, you type your instructions and a black box turns your words into a picture. All I had was my imagination and a sense that my prompt would need to be fairly but not exhaustively detailed."
On South 7th Street in St. Louis, a grand Catholic church stands opposite a Dollar Tree, creating a stark juxtaposition of faith and materialism. Placing a capital "I" in front of "Dollar Tree" underscored that contrast. The scene prompted testing of Google Gemini's Nano Banana image generator. The generator converted brief prompts into images that were impressive given minimal artistic input, yet those images showed harsh lines and geometric composition compared with genuine artists' work. A New Yorker cartoon was uploaded for reference, raising concerns that the model likely trained on such cartoons and may implicate copyright issues.
Read at Poynter
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]