I tested Google Gemini's new Nano Banana 2.1 image generator against ChatGPT — and I was surprised how close they are

(Image credit: ChatGPT/Gemini)

Google has given its Nano Banana AI image generator another upgrade, and the latest version, Nano Banana 2.1, is arriving inside Google Gemini in an increasingly crowded field of tools that can turn a few sentences into remarkably convincing pictures. The promise is familiar, with sharper details, better instruction-following, more accurate text, and greater consistency across images. The real challenge is finding something that makes it meaningfully better than the competition.

Nano Banana's main rival, ChatGPT's image…