Reddit users are claiming that Google’s Nano Banana 2 AI image generator has degraded, with one Pro user saying “the image quality seems to have been downgraded a lot. Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish, no matter how detailed my prompt is.” The article notes that Nano Banana has not been officially updated since February, and the last Gemini update in July—which introduced Gemini 3.6 Flash—did not change the image generator. Complaints about quality regressions date back to May, before that announcement. Google released Nano Banana 2 Lite at the start of July and has integrated Nano Banana 2 into products like Google Earth, but there is no indication the underlying image model was updated. The author suggests that changes to the text model interpreting prompts could produce different images without altering the generator itself. To test, the author recreated a Reddit comparison using the prompt: “I want an image of a photo that's taken by somebody looking up at the sky with a dragon flying overhead. I want you to make the dragon look as realistic as possible - as if it could actually be real.” The author found that ChatGPT’s image looked like a real photo, while Gemini’s did not, concluding that ChatGPT is winning the comparison.