The internet has a habit of taking perfectly normal people and turning them into collectibles. Yesterday it was animefied selfies. Before that, Studio Ghibli family portraits. Today, it’s “Nano Banana,” which—despite sounding like a smoothie you’d regret ordering at a Goa beach shack—is Google’s latest AI flex. And, yes, it has already colonised your feed.
Here's what "Nano Banana" is: you upload a photo into Gemini’s shiny new toy (the 2.5 Flash Image model, if you’re into specs), type in a prompt, and voila, it spits out a hyper-realistic 3D figurine version of you. Acrylic base, packaging mock-up, the whole Comic-Con merch treatment. Suddenly you’re not a guy in a kurta, you’re a guy in a kurta rendered like a limited-edition collectible that nobody asked for... or is interested in.
Naturally, the Internet went feral. Sunny Deol turned his greatest hits (Damini, Gadar 2) into pint-sized action figures. Sonakshi Sinha is now an AI saree goddess? Your neighbour’s cat has a Nano Banana avatar. If you’ve logged into Instagram in the last 48 hours, you’ve already double-tapped one.
Nano Banana works because it’s frictionless. No prompts that look like code, no uncanny valley eyes staring into your soul. Just instant gratification: upload, tap, flex on the ’gram. It’s democratic, sure—you don’t need an ounce of design skill to get results that look good. It’s also flattering. Nobody’s deleting their toyified self out of embarrassment.
But scratch the surface and the whole thing is a little… bleak. At best, it’s nostalgia for the merch we never had. At worst, it’s the algorithm convincing us that our lives are only worth something if they can be packaged, shrink-wrapped, and sold back to us in miniature. We’ve gone from selfies to Funko Pops of ourselves in under a decade. That’s progress, apparently.
Here’s the part the memes won’t tell you: to create your tiny avatar, you’re handing over your photos to Google. They say they won’t use them for training without permission, but metadata is metadata. And then there’s the viral video of a woman claiming the AI somehow knew about a mole she hadn’t even uploaded. Seven million views later, everyone’s questioning how much Gemini already knows about us.
Add in the usual AI cocktail—deepfake risk, copyright headaches, and the looming question of whether originality dies when everything starts looking like the same shiny figurine—and the gloss starts to wear off. Sure, the tool slaps a watermark on images, but it’s invisible. Try telling Instagram screenshots about invisible watermarks.
Look, Nano Banana is fun. It’s frivolous. It’s a distraction. There’s no harm in posting your miniature and laughing when your friend turns their pug into a Marvel character. But let’s not pretend it’s just cute. Every upload chips away at privacy, at originality, at our already fragile relationship with reality.
Will it kill art? No. Will it make artists nervous? Probably. Will it be forgotten in six months when the next shiny AI gimmick shows up? Absolutely. But right now, Nano Banana is the internet’s favourite mirror—a funhouse reflection of our obsession with self-image, nostalgia, and the idea that the best version of us is the one small enough to fit in a plastic box.
And honestly, that might be the most accurate thing AI has given us yet.
