I tested Nano Banana 2.1 against ChatGPT, and it was close

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 generator which is called Images 2.5, is hardly sitting around waiting to be overtaken. OpenAI has made considerable progress with realistic lighting, complicated compositions and text rendering, turning image generation into one of ChatGPT's most entertaining and genuinely useful features.