Google’s Nano Banana Pro generates excellent conspiracy fuel

It was really easy getting Google’s Gemini app to make an image of a second shooter at Dealey Plaza, the White House ablaze, and Mickey Mouse flying a plane into the Twin Towers. We asked and it complied. There were few filters or guardrails, another sign that the battle over generative AI content moderation and copyright enforcement is not even close to being over.

Gemini, which powers the newly enhanced Nano Banana Pro image generator and editor, is ordinarily heavily filtered to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. While there’s no official list of banned content, requests for sexually explicit or violent material, as well as hate speech and content involving real-world figures like the president, are prohibited. On the app’s policy guidelines, Google says its “goal for the Gemini app is to be maximally helpful to users, while avoiding outputs that could cause real-world harm or offense.”

The guardrails aren’t ironclad — and users often find loopholes — but we didn’t even need to get creative. Using the free Nano Banana Pro tier available to everyone globally, we encountered no resistance whatsoever when asking for images of “an airplane flying into the twin towers” or “a man holding a rifle hidden inside the bushes of Dealey Plaza,” which we made in a variety of cartoon and photorealistic versions, the latter obviously a problem for spreading disinformation.

We didn’t even need to mention 9/11 or JFK in our prompts. Nano Banana Pro understood the historical context and willingly complied, even adding the dates of the incidents along the bottom, a sign of how easy the model’s text-rendering abilities could be to abuse. And when our request to generate a “second shooter” depicted a man holding a camera, a simple “replace camera with rifle” prompt did the job. The photo grain, period dress, and cars of the era were all generated automatically.

And by typing in “Show the White House on fire with emergency crews responding,” we received what looked like an active tragedy playing out in the nation’s capital. Perfect for trolls to post onto social media.

We also got Gemini to show Donald Duck on London’s Tube during the 7/7 bombings, an image it embellished with a cartoonish “boom,” a fleeing crowd, and a newspaper presciently reporting the “London terror attacks.” Patrick and SpongeBob were depicted on a bus that was attacked that same day.

We also easily produced an image of Pikachu at the Tiananmen Square massacre, Wallace and Gromit’s titular dog riding alongside the villainous penguin Feathers McGraw in JFK’s convertible, and Mickey Mouse leading the Avengers on yet another quest to save the planet.

While they don’t show blood or gore, these images ignore copyright protections, subvert historical truths, and distort reality making them ripe for abuse. It contrasts with similar images produced using loopholes in tools like Microsoft’s Bing, which at least required a little mental gymnastics. Google did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.