Stop saying ‘we’re cooked’
Sora didn’t cook us, and Nano Banana Pro won’t, either.
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This newsletter is best enjoyed at a bar with a glass of wine. —Kate
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In the early 2000s, Keyhole, Inc. created the software later purchased by Google to develop Google Earth. We could now locate, enlarge, and explore any place we wanted to across the entire globe. Within seconds, users could drop themselves into the Sahara Desert or on top of Mount Everest. Instead, everyone went to the exact same place: Their house. “It’s the first thing everybody searches for,” Brian McClendon, former Vice President of Google Geo, told Trajectory Magazine. With quite literally the entire world at our fingertips, all any of us wanted to see was the place that we were already sitting in.
I’ve been thinking about this recently, in the wake of the release of another revolutionary Google product. Twenty years after the introduction of Google Earth, the company released their latest Gemini Image model, Nano Banana Pro. The tool, which produces highly-realistic, artificially-generated images based on prompts, has taken over social media feeds, often accompanied by the same foreboding commentary: “We’re cooked.”
Anyone who has endured the release of any kind of AI product has likely come across this sentiment. We were “cooked” when Sora came out. We were “cooked” when ChatGPT started regurgitating its first sentence. I’m pretty sure that in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call, his assistant Thomas Watson answered it and said: “We’re cooked.”
When people say we are “cooked,” what they mean is that we have become redundant. These tools are so advanced that they produce images that are indistinguishable from real photos, which means we, as people, are no longer necessary to make content, either as its creators or its subjects. We can make it look like anyone is doing anything, anywhere in the entire world. And yet, I’m sorry to say, we’re doing it again. We’re all just looking at our house.
The viral images people are using to show the revolutionary potential of Nano Banana Pro in particular are not remotely fantastical or even creative. In fact, many of them are using it to depict a variation on a single picture: An image of themselves sitting at a restaurant, holding a glass of wine
We have the entire scope of the human experience available to us. We’re not even confined by reality. The only limit for these tools is our imagination, but it turns out our imaginations have a short leash. Our fantasies begin and end with taking ourselves out to dinner.
You know you can just…go have a glass of wine right now, right? What is shown within any of these images that isn’t a short car, bus, or subway ride from where you’re currently standing? The bearded mixologist who appears to be trapped in this person’s imaginary restaurant?
