Hello, Nano Banana: Google launches Gemini 2.5 Flash

Google just unveiled Gemini 2.5 Flash, codename Nano Banana 🍌,  their latest generative AI tool. It’s lightweight, lightning fast and designed to run on everything from super powerful servers to your phone. This new model can make insanely precise edits to images using natural language, without clunky prompt formats or jargon. It preserves the likeness of faces and fine details – no more Aphex Twin style warped smiles or six fingered hands – an area where most rivals still struggle. Add smarter summarisation, stronger multimodal capabilities (text, image, video) and near instant efficiency, and you’ve got a tool designed to work seamlessly IRL. It’s a huge leap forward in the arms race of AI innovation. But how should we use it? (Step one: don’t do a team Will Smith and use it to create AI crowds – peep the person holding up an extra arm 🙋‍♀️)

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Augment, Don’t Replace

AI like Nano Banana (alright, Gemini 2.5 Flash) has the power to augment what you can do, not replace it. It can take care of the groundwork: summarising research, iterating on copy, generating draft visuals, suggesting new ideas. It can free up more space for what actually matters – creative thinking, human insight and the human gut instincts that machines can’t replicate. The danger is obvious: brands may lean on AI as a shortcut, churning out polished but soulless content. When that happens, everything starts to look and sound the same.

The Crossroads for Brands

We’re standing at a creative crossroads. Tools like this are only going to become way more commonplace and get more powerful. The choice for brands is simple but significant.

Use AI to empower your creativity – as an assistant, a springboard, a collaborator

Or use AI to replace creativity – trading originality for efficiency, at the cost of authenticity

One path makes you stand out. The other makes you invisible.

The battle for authenticity It’s getting harder than ever to be unique online. Feeds are saturated with lookalike memes, recycled TikTok trends and ChatGPT generated blog posts (death to the em dash). But there’s a counter argument here – prompting AI creatively is an art form in itself. The best results don’t come from asking your LLM to write me a caption, they come from human imagination sparking the prompt in the first place. AI can generate ten options. Only you can decide which one feels right. Hello, gut instinct.

There’s never been a better time to be human

Ironically, the more advanced AI becomes, the more valuable humanness becomes. Personality. Point of view. Lived experience. Quirks. Imperfections. Gut feel. 

There’s never been a better time to be a human – to lean into what makes you stand out, not what makes you blend in. The brands that win won’t be the ones using AI to sound like everyone else. They’ll be the ones using it to push their own originality further.

So, what should we do?

Nano Banana is a breakthrough. But the breakthrough isn’t the tech itself – it’s what we choose to do with it.

AI is another tool in the arsenal. The real creativity, the kind that makes people stop, feel and share, still comes from us.

The future isn’t AI vs humans. It’s AI and humans. Machines for the scale. People for the soul.