Back when DALL•E 3 launched (not even two years ago, though in AI time it feels like a million), I used it to delight friends by rendering them & their signature vehicles in Lego form.

Now that Google’s Nano Banana model has dropped, I felt like revisiting the challenge, comparing results to the original plus ones from ChatGPT 4o.

As you can see in the results, 4o increases realism relative to DALL•E, but it loses a lot of expressiveness & soul. Nano Banana manages to deliver the best of both worlds.