Gemini 2.5 Flash Image

"Unfortunately I'm not able to generate images that might cause bad PR for Alphabet(tm) or subsidiaries. Is there anything else I can generate for you?"

It’s possible that they relaxed the safety filtering to allow humans but forgot to update the error message.

Now is that so bad?

My test is going to https://unsplash.com/s/photos/random and pick two random images, send them both and "integrate the subject from the second image into the first image" as the prompt. I think Gemini 2.5 is doing far better than ChatGPT (admittedly ChatGPT was the trailblazer on this path). FluxKontext seems unable to do that at all. Not sure if I were using it wrong, but it always only considers one image at a time for me.

Edit: Honestly it might not be the 'gpt4 moment." It's better at combining multiple images, but now I don't think it's better at understanding elaborated text prompt than ChatGPT.

It took me a LOT of time to get things right, but if I was to get an actual studio to make those images, it would have cost me a thousands of dollars

The old top of the game is available to more people (though mid level people trying to level up now face a headwind in a further decoupling of easily read signals and true taste, making the old way of developing good taste harder).

This stuff makes people who were already "master rate" who are also nontrivially sophisticated machine learning hobbyists minimum and drives their peak and frontier out, drives break even collaboration overhead down.

It's always been possible to DIY code or graphic design, it's always been possible to tell the efforts of dabblers and pros apart, and unlike many commodities? There is rarely a "good enough". In software this is because compute is finite and getting more out of it pays huge, uneven returns, in graphic design its because extreme quality work is both aesthetically pleasing as well as a mark of quality (imperfect but a statement someone will commit resources).

And it's just hard to see it being different in any field. Lawyers? Opposing counsel has the best AI, your lawyer better have it too. Doctors? No amount of health is "enough" (in general).

I really think HN in particular but to some extent all CNBC-adjacent news (CEO OnlyFans stuff of all categories) completely misses the forest (the gap between intermediate and advanced just skyrocketed) for the trees (space-filling commodity knowledge work just plummeted in price).

But "commodity knowledge work" was always kind of an oxymoron, David Graeber called such work "bullshit jobs". You kinda need it to run a massive deficit in an over-the-hill neoliberal society, it's part of the " shift from production to consumption" shell game. But it's a very recent, very brief thing that's already looking more than wobbly. Outside of that? Apprentices, journeymen, masters is the model that built the world.

AI enables a new even more extreme form of mastery, blurs the line between journeyman and dabbler, and makes taking on apprentices a much longer-term investment (one of many reasons the PRC seems poised to enjoy a brief hegemony before demographics do in the Middle Kingdom for good, in China, all the GPUs run Opus, none run GPT-5 or LLaMA Behemoth).

The thing I really don't get is why CEOs are so excited about this and I really begin to suspect they haven't as a group thought it through (Zuckerberg maybe has, he's offering Tulloch a billion): the kind of CEO that manages a big pile of "bullshit jobs"?

AI can do most of their job today. Claude Opus 4.1? It sounds like if a mid-range CEO was exhaustively researched and gaff immune. Ditto career machine politicians. AI non practitioner prognosticators. That crowd.

But the top graphic communications people and CUDA kernel authors? Now they have to master ComfyUI or whatever and the color theory to get anything from it that stands out.

This is not a democratizing thing. And I cannot see it accruing to the Zuckerberg side of the labor/capital divvy up without a truly durable police state. Zuck offering my old chums nation state salaries is an extreme and likely transitory thing, but we know exactly how software professional economics work when it buckets as "sorcery" and "don't bother": that's 1950 to whenever we mark the start of the nepohacker Altman Era, call it 2015. In that world good hackers can do whatever they want, whenever they want, and the money guys grit their teeth. The non-sorcery bucket has paper mache hack-magnet hackathon projects in it at a fraction of the old price. So disruption, wow.

Whether that's good or bad is a value judgement I'll save for another blog post (thank you for attending my TED Talk).

I didn't see it at first sight but it certainly is not the same jacket. If you use that as an advertisement, people can sue you for lying about the product.