Seedream 4.0 Arrives
Is it a Nano Banana Killer?
I really fell of my writing habit over the last two weeks, as I was building something with, or watching YouTube videos about Google’s Nano Banana. No it’s not a ‘Photoshop Killer’, but in the space of a just a few weeks, it’s become the new normal. Almost every paid platform offers it, several Google websites offer it for free, and every day brings some new trick that it can accomplish. Rob De Winter quickly built a a Photoshop Plugin that made it even more useful. And Adobe, not to be outdone, will officially add it to Photoshop Beta by the end of the month. While it’s a bit of a mouthful, it’s becoming a reflexive verb, as in to ‘Nano Banana’ something just like we photoshop something.
So that’s the summary of what I tried to write over the last two weeks before abandoning it to today’s headline as SeeDream 4.0 has arrived and in some way’s it’s even better than Nano Banana. To refresh, Seedance is the name of the family of models, owned by parent company ByteDance, which brings us our beloved TikTok. I’ve only been using for the last few days and it can do everything that Nano Banana can do, but it produces much higher resolution images and can handle different aspect ratios. While it struggled with character consistency in a few cases, it now means we have two revolutionary at our disposal. If you’d like to catch up on all my experiments over the last two weeks, you see them on my LinkedIn profile .
If you’d like a longer read about why Nano Banana is such a revolutionary moment, check out this essay from Paul DelSignore
If you’d like a complete guide to all the syntax used to generate images in Nano Banana, Miguel Ivanov has you covered.
To put this in context, and to show what both tools are capable of, all the video of the woman (below) is generated from a single image.
Some Good News About The Job Market
While this one comes from the UK, it’s regarding Publicis, which is the world’s largest Ad Agency. Despite investing heavily inAI tools, they’re making a big commitment to hiring junior employees because they want to train the next generation. Hopefully, large firms in the US will follow this path.
“We’re 100 per cent employing the same number of junior people as before,” Bornman told City AM. “We’re a people-based business. We have to train the next generation of media planners. We’ve got to educate them. “Over the last 18 months we’ve invested a lot in apprentice programmes,”
Not to be outdone, here in Seattle, the UW computer science department is pushing back on AI job fears and says, ‘The sky is not falling’
“Coding, or the translation of a precise design into software instructions, is dead,” Balazinska previously told GeekWire. “AI can do that. We have never graduated coders. We have always graduated software engineers. You won’t be replaced by an AI system, but you might be replaced by a person who uses AI better than you.”
And, McKinsey is doubling down on entry-level hires — even in the AI era
100 Days of Vibe Coding
Want to see if you really have what it takes to ‘Vibe Code’ something? Check out this fun gamified experience at 100 Vibe Coding. You just have to describe what you want before getting to the next level. The first ten levels are free. This was fun for me because I spent 20 years writing html and css, but if you’re curious, you should check it out.😂
The Vibe Making Illusion
I’ve had one of the most creative and productive summers of my adult life. This partially because the kids are older and I have more time and partially because I’m super disciplined now. I get up early and I get on the computer and make things every day. While it’s easy to look back at how much I’ve accomplished, I’m really the sort of person that Rodrigo Osornio is talking about in this excellent article.
Simulation of mastery is changing our standards. We are getting comfortable with a good‑enough economy that confuses fluency with understanding, speed with judgment, and pattern‑matching with innovation. It makes life easier, and can make us worse at the kind of thinking that creates new things. As workplaces rapidly adopt AI, we risk training performance over understanding.
Community Focus: Anna Dawson
What’s it like using AI tools in your real professional Web Design workflow? I recently stumbled upon the YouTube channel of one of my favorite former students, Anna Dawson. You should really check out her channel.
Anthropic’s AI Fluency
I recently completed Anthropic’s ‘Teaching AI Fluency’ certificate program and I’m really excited to adding it’s concepts to my curriculum. If you have college aged people in your life I strongly recommend they check AI Fluency for Students.
Alright, that’s it for today. I hope you’re feeling energized and creative in your life, even if it is an AI powered illusion. Questions? Send me a message, or connect with me on LinkedIn.