Nano Banana: A Dangerous Tipping Point for AI

Plus, checking out 1978's "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali."

Images and video have always been manipulated, going back to the earliest analog days of celluloid film and darkrooms. Just ask Georges Méliès, or the guy in charge of airbrushing people out of Stalin snapshots. But having played with some of the newest reality-altering tools like Google's Nano Banana image editor, it feels like we're entering a new era of un-reality.

The difference—and Nano Banana shows us this specifically—is that minor, subtle tweaks to an image are now achievable with just a few natural language commands. And the results come without the most obvious telltale signs of AI manipulation. That's far different from the first few generations of AI photo editing that typically over-altered images, changing faces, text, and backgrounds haphazardly. Those AI fingerprints have previously helped us detect manipulated images, betrayed by warped text, six-fingered hands, and uncanny-valley vibes.

My uh-oh moment came a few days ago, while attempting to take a photo of my teenager. As one might expect, he refused to smile and made faces instead. I uploaded one otherwise good photo into Gemini and used the Nano Banana photo editor tool to tweak his grimace into a smile in seconds, leaving the rest of the photo unchanged. All it took was a single natural language command. Nothing very specific, no masking parts of the image, no redoing it over and over to get something usable.

What's new and especially concerning is that the level of sophistication and expertise previously required to go into an image and make subtle, realistic changes no longer calls for an airbrush artist or Photoshop pro. Yes, documents and photos were always fakeable—people could be inserted, removed, or altered—but to do a truly professional job required a professional, or at least a talented amateur with a certain number of hours under their belt.

This didn't ever stop pranksters and bad actors from manipulating photos and video, but the required investment in hiring or obtaining expert-level skills provided a natural barrier to entry. Now, anyone can create forged images with the kind of subtle tweaks a Cold War spy org might use to psychologically manipulate its intended audience.

The biggest danger from this kind of instant-gratification AI manipulation isn't making something big and unimaginable look real; it's in making small changes feel organic. That's especially nefarious when it comes to news photos. Make a small AI change to a publicly shared photo of a politician or public figure and re-share it, and you could easily fool a general audience that might have seen the original photo but not clock that this new version manipulates a facial expression, text on a sign, or even an injury.

After a few days with Nano Banana and similar one-shot reality-altering tools, who's ever going to believe a screenshot again?

“We are the greatest!” When Superman met Muhammad Ali

Speaking of alternate realities... Growing up and collecting comics in the '80s, I was always more of a Marvel guy than a DC one. That's why, when the new Superman and Fantastic Four films landed within weeks of each other, I expected to be more drawn to the latter. But in reality, Superman (and James Gunn) widely exceeded my expectations, while the F4 film was surprisingly forgettable.

About a month after that cinematic showdown, I was going through some old boxes of comics and found a long box filled with large-format comics from the '70s and '80s, including a stack of classic Marvel Treasury Edition books. But what caught my eye most of all was a large-format Superman vs. Muhammad Ali one-shot from 1978.

So I grabbed that issue and a couple of the oversized Marvel comics and ordered some specialty frames from a place called The Collector's Resource, with the intention of framing and hanging a few of these in my home office/workshop.

Before I did that, I gave Superman vs. Muhammad Ali a readthrough, as I remembered nothing about it. It's a wild ride, with aliens threatening mankind and the two protagonists feuding over who should be Earth's champion in a one-on-one fight to save the planet.

I've done a quick walkthrough of the entire issue here, and trust me, it's a cool cultural artifact. I think it presents better as a three-minute overview than reading it from cover to cover. The most interesting tidbit to me was how in this version of the 1978 DC Universe, Clark, Lois and Jimmy Olson work for a local TV news station rather than for the Daily Planet.

I haven't checked in on the current Superman continuity in some time, but I wonder how long it will take for the Daily Planet to follow in the footsteps of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and exit the print newspaper business altogether.

The Cheat Sheet

> Read my book here: The Tetris Effect
> Threads: threads.net/@danack
> Bsky: danackerman.bsky.social
> LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danackerman
> TikTok: tiktok.com/@danacknyc
> YouTube: youtube.com/danackerman
> IG: instagram.com/danack
> MC News: microcenter.news