MLA 025 AI Image Generation 2026: GPT Image, Nano Banana, Midjourney, Flux

Editing replaced generation as the core task. How GPT Image 2.5, Google's Nano Banana line, Midjourney V8.2 and Flux 2 differ, what open weights and LoRAs buy you, ControlNet vs instruction editing, and how licensing and C2PA provenance work now. Links More OCDevel shows - this one has siblings, each on its own subject and produced the same way Companion show. This episode is the overview. For weekly, hands-on coverage of the full image and video pipeline, from a first usable clip to scenes that cut together, listen to AI Video Generation. Try a walking desk - stay healthy & sharp while you learn & code

First of three episodes on AI media generation (this one is images and editing; then video, then the pipeline). A decision guide rather than a leaderboard: where GPT Image, Nano Banana, Midjourney and Flux each fit in late 2026, why instruction-driven editing replaced generation as the core task, what open weights buy you, and how licensing and provenance work. What changed: editing, instruction-following, references, text The 2025 "artist vs collaborator" split is over and the collaborators won. Every frontier image model now sits behind a language model that reads the prompt with world knowledge and accepts images as input, so the unit of work became "here is an image, change this one thing and keep everything else." Text rendering, precise instruction following and identity-preserving reference images all landed at once for one reason: the image model became, or was paired with, a multimodal language model. Generation from scratch is now the special case where the input image is empty. OpenAI: GPT Image 2.5 The lineage runs gpt-image-1 (2025), gpt-image-2, then ChatGPT Images 2.5 in September 2026, with a precision variant (Sunburst) and a fast default (Flare); the same models power ChatGPT and the Images API. As of this recording it holds the top slots on both the LMArena text-to-image and image-edit boards and on Artificial Analysis. For editing it does mask inpainting, up to four reference images, and multi-turn editing via the Responses API. Its weaknesses are latency at high quality and occasional text and consistency slips. Billing is per token (text in, image in, image out) with a cached-input discount; see the gpt-image-2.5-sunburst model page. Google: the Nano Banana lineage Nano Banana was gemini-2.5-flash-image (August 2025, now legacy). It was succeeded by Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image) and Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image, February 2026), plus a Lite tier. Per the Gemini image generation docs, Nano Banana 2 accepts up to fourteen reference images (objects plus characters), outputs up to 4K, does multi-turn sequential editing, and can ground generation in Google Search; the Pro model adds style references and identity preservation across up to five subjects. Every output carries a SynthID watermark with no opt-out. Imagen appears to be superseded for new work, though no formal retirement notice was found. Midjourney V8.2 and the Edit Model Midjourney moved from V7 (2025) to V8 alpha in March 2026 and V8.2 as the default in July 2026 (version history). V8.2's Edit Model replaces Omni Reference, Character Reference, Retexture and the Editor with one instruction-driven model taking up to four references, the same convergence OpenAI and Google made. Aesthetics and draft-mode ideation remain its strengths. The hard limits: still no official API and terms that bar automation; generations public by default below the Stealth tier; and it is the defendant in Disney Enterprises v. Midjourney (filed June 2025, joined by a separate Warner Bros. Discovery suit), currently in discovery with Midjourney demanding the studios' own AI records. Flux: the open-weight default and its license tiers Black Forest Labs, founded by the original Stable Diffusion authors, shipped FLUX.1 Kontext (in-context editing without masks) in 2025 and FLUX.2 in November 2025: a Mistral vision-language model paired with a rec