I Tested Meta's New AI Image Generator Against ChatGPT and Nano Banana 2 Using the Same 5 Prompts - and the Winner Surprised Me
TechRadar, Monday, July 13th, 2026
A five-prompt head-to-head of Meta AI, ChatGPT and Gemini's Nano Banana 2 image models, won overall by ChatGPT.
TechRadar ran the same five image prompts through Meta's new AI image model, ChatGPT and Google Gemini's Nano Banana 2, covering a product poster, photorealistic wildlife, a social invite, a four-panel comic and a noir cartoon.
Nano Banana 2 was consistently strongest on realism, while Meta AI took the biggest creative swings and produced the most premium commercial visuals.
ChatGPT won overall by most reliably matching both the wording and the intent of each prompt, especially on typography-heavy designs. Meta's clearest win was the noir cookie-mystery cartoon, where it best embraced the ridiculous premise. The conclusion: all three are capable, and the differentiator is judgment about what the user actually meant.