Comment by simonw
1 day ago
In case anyone missed Max's Nano Banana prompting guide, it's absolutely the definitive manual for prompting the original Nano Banana... and I tried some of the prompts in there against Nano Banana Pro and found it to be very applicable to the new model as well.
https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/#hello-nan...
My recreations of those pancake batter skulls using Nano Banana Pro: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/20/nano-banana-pro/#tryin...
In my experience multimodal models like gpt-image-1/nano/etc. don't really require a lot of prompt trickery [1] like the good ol' days of SD 1.5.
To be clear, that's a good thing though. It's also one of the reasons why "prompt engineering" will become less relevant as model understanding goes up.
[1] - Unless you're trying to circumvent guardrails
Does the refrigerator magnet system prompt leak [1] still work?
[1] https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/#hello-nan....
Good call, I hadn't tried that. Here's what I got in AI Studio for:
It did NOT leak any system prompt: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/nano-banana-fri...
No, interestingly. (got a similar result as Simon did)
There may be more clever tricks to try and surface it though.
Update: The system prompt parameter now works on Nano Banana Pro, which may imply the system prompt does not exist. https://x.com/minimaxir/status/1991709411447042125
> it's absolutely the definitive manual
How do you know Simon? It's certainly a blog post, with content about prompting in it. If your goal is to make generative art that uses specific IP, I wouldn't use it.
Do you know of a better document specifically about prompting Nano Banana?
Why don't you just ask Gemini? It will tell you! There's no mystery.
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