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Comment by momojo | Hacker News Reader

What's the state of the art for image gen? I'm far removed and pretty happy with the free Gemini tier but its notable to me that I rarely see boasting about being "the best image generator yet" and I wonder if that's because they're all just good enough?

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It has to be Google, since OpenAI always compares to other companies when it feels its winning at some benchmarks. They didn't even compare on cost, speed, or any benchmarks at all.

How do you sensibly benchmark this product?

https://openrouter.ai/benchmarks/media/images

Depends on the use. For pics, nano banana still feels like the best. For designs/posters, gpt-image is king by a very large margin.

king at making the same 2-3 flyer and poster designs that all look terrible and are recognizable even from afar?

IMO a lot of that is steering from the chatgpt harness. If you ask chatgpt for "a poster showing my latest burger specials", it really steers it towards the same look as everything else.

Try it via the API with your own LLM for stylistic steering. You'll find that chatgpt actually obfuscates how good the model actually is. You can get some serious variety out of it.

If you want some examples, halfway down the page I show comparisons of the same bookstore website in different styles - all of these were from gpt image: https://diffui.ai/for/bootstrappers (disclaimer that this is a product I work on blahblahblah capitalism)

Generally depends on use case and style. Midjourney, Seedream, GPT Image are commonly regarded contenders IMO.

I've been running a comparative image benchmark site for years now (see my profile for the link), ever since SDXL back in 2023, and the answer really comes down to it depends. My benchmark focuses primarily on prompt adherence, but that's just one metric you can use. (fidelity, censorship, explorative, speed, features, etc are others)

In terms of overall state of the art, the two major contenders are probably Nano Banana Pro (Google) and the GPT Image 2 series (OpenAI).

For pure prompt adherency, OpenAI has consistently lead the pack since the original gpt-image-1 released back in March of 2025.... but its OpenAI's fidelity has always left something to be desired. Version 2 of the series has definitely closed the gap a bit.

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