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Notes -
So how did LLMs impressed you this week? My case - I had lost original 3mf, but had OrcaSlicer temp folder, which ironically orca can't open. I ask codex-cli to try and reconstruct a proper 3mf. For my astonishment is did on the second try.
Finally got around to test progress on image generation again.
My go-to test is creating an entire fake Instagram influencer from scratch. That nicely tests consistency between images, spacial understanding of the scene, prompt following on minute details, ect. It keeps me up to date on what the problems are when you fake photos of people (or fake entire people in general). I mostly create women, because that's more fun to me and also because this tests model censorship more effectively - the commercial models are a lot more touchy when creating women than when they create men.
The main result of my most recent session is particularly funny: Nano Banana 2 is another significant step forward on photo-realism, but it is exceedingly difficult to get it to produce images of conventionally beautiful people from scratch. Getting just a portrait of a woman that is above a 7 requires a lot of coaxing. If the major focus of the prompt is on some other detail, it will generate the most mid women you've ever seen. Nano Banana 1 was perfectly happy to just spit out 10s. You start the prompt with "photo-realistic full body shot of an attractive female college student..." and you could focus on scene, clothes, body position, camera equipment, ect., and it only needed minor coaxing for some body types and poses (as long as you kept it SFW). But Nano Banana 2 will often simply ignores instructions that coax other models towards conventional beauty. I wonder why. Peak body positivity seems long past. Did earlier models train predominantly on pictures of influencers on social media (because they post so much), and now photos of the rest of humanity have a more proportional ratio in the training data? Or are they trying to stop me, in particular, from creating and monetizing an Instagram e-thot? (I'm not, of course, I've lost interest in image generation, again, very quickly).
Other than that: prompt following is truly impressive now. You can pick scene, clothes, and body positions (either by describing them or supplying reference photos), and it will usually one-shot them down to the correct head tilt angle. Consistency (same person in different images) requires a bit of care, or ideally tons of reference images. We're not completely out of the uncanny valley for faces created completely from scratch, but this is where I notice the most progress (Nano Banana 1 makes beautiful people, but they look like influencers with the filters maxed out in the best case, and like very good paintings in the median case). Around 1% of images still have extra limbs or other easy tells.
Oh, and making images that help explain a technical concept is still hilariously bad. A straight rip-off of an existing image with a liberal dose of detail errors is the best you can expect. Ah, factual correctness in every detail... the old nemesis of AI still lives on.
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