Doctor Who

I've been experimenting with Google's latest AI image generator (Nano Banana 2) to generate Jamie's Angels "fanart". AI image generation has come on a lot since last year; NB2 is capable of some impressive feats, such as tracking the flow of events in an image and guessing what came before or might come next. It's also still capable of out-and-out stupidity. One minute it's generating an entire six-panel comic strip with all dialogue correct, the next it's drawing characters with three arms or swapping whole people, or bits of them, in and out between frames. I haven't been sharing the results online because there doesn't seem to be any point; anyone who does want AI-generated fanart can generate it themselves with equal ease.

What made me do a double-take this time was that in my prompt, I gave it, as usual, character forenames, descriptions and costumes; and from that, the generator was able to deduce that there was a Doctor Who connection and added an unprompted police box in the background.

It's also possible to feed Nano Banana 2 an image and have it simulate people commenting on it, just in case one's ego is fragile enough to be flattered by fake reviews of one's fake fanart. (I was impressed that it understood the dialogue enough to follow Zoë's "Barbara Celarent" jibe). What's amusing is that when you do it with an image that it's generated itself, the comments sometimes point out mistakes (such as Isobel's camera suddenly teleporting to Gia). Which is all very well, but if the generator's got enough smarts to spot that something's wrong, it would would have been better to use them when generating the image in the first place.