Six months ago I asked for a Central Asian woman with deep russet-brown skin and freckles, and Flux handed me a white woman. Repeatedly. So did Grok, Seedream, GPT-2, and MAI—every top-shelf model whitewashing the same prompt to various degrees. Then Google dropped Nano Banana 2 on February 26, and for the first time a model got close enough to argue with instead of throw out. Close enough that I could finish the job by hand: a dozen generations, masked composites, and freckles hand-painted back into pigment in Photoshop. The silicon half of the bias is finally moving. The other half is the part nobody wants to talk about.
The Art of Digital Remixing
I’ll admit right off the bat that I’m not an illustrator. I have no drawing or painting talent whatsoever (aside from stick figure cartoons that my kids find mildly amusing). But one thing I’m somewhat good at is digital remixing of other people’s art.