‘Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish’: I saw Reddit arguing that Google’s AI image generator had got worse — so I ran my own comparison against ChatGPT
AI Platforms & Assistants Gemini ‘Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish’: I saw Reddit arguing that Google’s AI image generator had got worse — so I ran my own comparison against ChatGPT Features By Graham Barlow Published 5 August 2026 Can an AI image generator get worse? Or is something else going on here… When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish, no matter how detailed my prompt is.
- ▪AI Platforms & Assistants Gemini ‘Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish’: I saw Reddit arguing that Google’s AI image generator had got worse — so I ran my own comparison against ChatGPT Features By Graham Barlow Published 5 Augu
- ▪Or is something else going on here… When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
- ▪Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish, no matter how detailed my prompt is.
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| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/gemini/now-almost-every-image-looks-flat-or-cartoonish-i-saw-reddit-arguing-that-googles-ai-image-generator-had-got-worse-so-i-ran-my-own-comparison-against-chatgpt |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:37:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T16:40:47.436Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T16:40:47.436Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YsUQLmTvUHjk · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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AI Platforms & Assistants Gemini ‘Now, almost every image looks flat or cartoonish’: I saw Reddit arguing that Google’s AI image generator had got worse — so I ran my own comparison against ChatGPT Features By Graham Barlow Published 5 August 2026 Can an AI image generator get worse? Or is something else going on here… When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Google / OpenAI) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Looking through a recent thread on Reddit comparing images created with the same prompt on Nano Banana 2 and ChatGPT, I noticed an…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechRadar.
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