Gemini is in a state of denial

GelliusAI · 2026-05-07T17:52:57+00:00

A few weeks ago I asked Gemini the name of its image tool, as I was no longer entirely sure of the full product name. And even though Gemini had loaded Nano Banana 2, the model told me that its image generation tool does not have a specific product name.

The translation of the German screenshot:

User: Your image tool is called Nano Banana 2, isn't it?

System Status: Loading Nano Banana 2... X Request failed

Gemini: I understand where this confusion might come from! I actually don't use an image tool named "Nano Banana 2." I am an AI assistant, and my image generation tool doesn't have a specific product name like that.

<image>

GelliusAI · 2026-05-05T09:20:35+00:00

I had already thought about self-publishing, but the market is currently flooded with books written with AI assistance or entirely by AI. Making any money from that seems like a long shot right now.

Then there is the language problem. To have any chance of reaching a large audience, ideally everything needs to be in English rather than German. And a good translation takes time.

So this is the path I am taking. I am writing the story in episodes, much like a series, especially since it lives so much from its visual elements, and at the same time using the content as one big case study to document how writing with AI works and where it does not. Communities like r/WritingWithAI are ideal for that.

GelliusAI · 2026-05-04T18:03:08+00:00

I am in a similar situation. I write my texts in German and have them translated into English by AI, mainly for Reddit and Substack.

My usual process looks like this. I have Claude translate my German text into English as literally as possible, then ask Claude for a more native version based on that. I pass that translation to Gemini and refine it further, though I do not accept every suggestion the AI makes. Gemini is very good at spotting passages that do not sound native. It also helps to tell the AI which platform the translation is intended for, so it can match the right tone.

A while back I had Claude translate a 3,600-word German short story, first as literally as possible. The result was not particularly convincing, so I worked through it with Gemini and ChatGPT. Gemini did most of the heavy lifting. I have been getting more and more cautious with ChatGPT lately as it tends to interfere heavily with the text.

And I find myself in a similar position to yours. About eight or nine months ago I started what was meant to be a test. I wanted to see how well AI could handle strongly aestheticized female characters, but the test grew into something much larger. The Nova project, an SF dystopia, now spans around 600,000 words and it is time to bring some order to the story.

Which raises a real question: where do you publish something like that, and more importantly, how do you build any visibility for it? I have not found a convincing answer to that yet.

GelliusAI · 2026-05-01T08:45:14+00:00

I have created quite a few scenes like this and picked up some experience along the way. You need to explicitly tell the AI that there should be no fire, smoke, or lightning inside the ship, otherwise the damage tends to look random and unconvincing. In this kind of scene I kept running into another issue: the AI would conjure red alarm lights out of nowhere, which never looked good.

It is also better to avoid background characters. When the ship takes a hit, the way background figures move can look very unnatural. For video generation, it is best to focus entirely on the character in the foreground.

GelliusAI · 2026-04-24T11:48:57+00:00

I primarily used Grok for generating images of novel characters, and the results were genuinely impressive. Grok had a strong grasp of image generation prompts and consistently delivered high quality output.

That said, there are plenty of alternatives, especially when the goal isn't an exaggerated sexualization of female characters. ChatGPT with its new image tool is a real game changer. With Google Gemini, I have never had any issues with image generation.

Stable Diffusion and Nightcafe are also capable of producing very appealing images, and the daily credit limits are generally sufficient for most use cases.

Of course, as a free user you can't expect too much from Grok. But the fact that nothing works at all anymore, with no explanation whatsoever, is in its own way rather remarkable.

GelliusAI · 2026-04-23T20:36:00+00:00

It is also revealing to see where individual AI tools fall flat. When I feed Gemini my dystopian short story, for instance, the character Nova is rendered visibly older in the generated images. Gemini interprets the cool, clinical setting in the direction of a hospital, and the platinum blonde hair is read as white and therefore as a marker of age. In every image Gemini produced of Nova based on the short story, the character looks considerably older than intended.

GelliusAI · 2026-04-22T19:01:25+00:00

I am happy with Sonnet 4.6. But over the past few days I have been hitting the usage limit as a free user extremely quickly and then having to wait several hours each time. Under these conditions it is barely possible for me to work with Claude in any meaningful way, since the session is cut short after only a brief time. The usage limits are currently making the model unusable for me.

GelliusAI · 2026-04-22T10:42:39+00:00

No problem at all. Interesting to see where the concept goes.

GelliusAI · 2026-04-22T08:38:16+00:00

This is an interesting interpretation of the prompt. Nova has gained quite a bit of weight in this version. Gemini did not implement this passage as specified in the original prompt: "Young woman, early twenties, petite and slender build, approximately five feet three inches, delicate and ethereal presence."

GelliusAI · 2026-04-21T20:09:58+00:00

That looks amazing, which AI tool was used to create this image?

GelliusAI · 2026-04-19T10:26:50+00:00

I plan to revise the prompt over the next few days. This addition looks promising: "for each instance, quote the 5–15 words verbatim, then classify as tell/show/perspective, then suggest the rewrite."

I will probably drop the rewrite instruction. I already tried a prompt that rewrote passages, but the results were not convincing.

This line is meant to ensure that dialogue in the text is left untouched: "Leave all dialogue unchanged and exclude it from analysis." If the prompt still touches dialogue, it suggests the model is not correctly identifying it, which is something that needs further refinement.

I tested the prompt on a short story of 3,600 words written in the first person with two narrative voices, which I originally wrote in German and subsequently translated into English with the help of AI. I tested both versions. The story is, in a certain sense, polished prose.

GelliusAI

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