Artificial intelligence has radically changed the way we produce and consume images. In less than ten years, we’ve gone from experiments like DeepDream—turning photos into dreamlike, distorted visions—to platforms such as DALL·E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion, capable of creating detailed illustrations or photorealistic images from a simple written description. Today, there’s no need to master complex tools like Photoshop: just type a few words to get surprising results.
The birth of a curious name: Nano Banana
Among the protagonists of this revolution is a curious name: Nano Banana. Its story began almost by chance, as an image generation and editing model tested anonymously on evaluation platforms. No one knew that behind that unusual name was a Google project, designed for the Gemini line. But within a few weeks, Nano Banana went viral, winning over the internet with its ability to transform photographs into something completely new and astonishing.
From tool to digital culture
Its power is not only technical but also cultural. The model can change a person’s clothing or expressions while preserving their identity, alter backgrounds without breaking the scene’s coherence, and even merge multiple images into a single natural composition. The name, born as a temporary label, was adopted by users and turned into a symbol. Memes, digital miniatures, stickers, and collages flooded social networks, showing how AI-generated creativity can, in just weeks, become part of our daily imagination.
A collective creative process
What stands out is that Nano Banana is not just a tool but a social phenomenon. Every user who engages with it becomes a co-creator: launching a prompt, receiving a result, and putting it back into circulation to be reinterpreted by others. It’s a collective, almost choral process, where the traditional notion of author gives way to shared creativity. There’s no longer a single signature, but rather a chain of contributions that make it difficult to determine who truly created the work.
Copyright: who signs the image?
And here arises the question that will follow us in the coming years: if an image like those of Nano Banana is not the work of a single artist but the product of an ongoing dialogue between human and machine, who can truly claim authorship? Can we still talk about copyright as we know it today, or are we facing a shift that will require new rules? Perhaps the art of the future will no longer have clear boundaries but will instead be a fluid, shared space—where creativity belongs to everyone and no one at the same time.
Should AI-generated images have a recognized author, or is their destiny to remain collective heritage—free and without owners?
