Coarse Is Better

It's ridiculous lol.

Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.

If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.

[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.

Is some kind of MoE or routing (but for image models obviously), depending on the prompt ask, a possible solve?

Years of refinement on the taste of people with no taste has produced a model with no taste. Crazy

AI doesn’t make art. The OP is trying to fit the square peg of their intuitive understanding about the art creation process into the round hole of generating it via AI

You’re definitely on to something, people wouldn’t criticize as much as they are otherwise, they’d ignore it.

I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.

While I don’t disagree with the author, these are simply two completely different tools with different use cases. Nano Banana Pro throws out fantastic images you can actually use in your marketing right away. It’s not an art tool - it’s a business tool

As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art

The author is using special prompts exploiting flaws of the old models, and doesn't like that new models interpret the hacks literally instead.

The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.

The author claims the old models are better at creating art than the new ones. I disagree; art requires consciousness and intent while this type of model is capable of neither.

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I don’t see splashes of primary color as more artistic. Anyway, what if you just ask it “more coarse”? I see impressive depth in the latest outputs, but as with all technically proficient performers, you might just have to consciously scale it back.

The author has succeeded only in arguing one meaningless image factory produces images they find more aesthetically pleasing than another meaningless image factory.

The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.