How are viral trends different from educational and commercial uses of LLM image generation and editing? A privacy-preserving descriptive analysis

Will Tucker-Ray, Marika Swanberg, Alexander Knop, Marvin Chow, Eric Culbertson +7

Gemini's Nano Banana models, first introduced in late 2025, led to a shift in the capabilities and use of image generation and editing. We utilize Urania, a Google-developed framework for generating insights about LLM chatbot interactions with rigorous differential privacy (DP) guarantees, to analyze use cases and intents, techniques and ways of prompting, without ever looking at a single image or individual prompt. We select a subsample of 2.1M conversations in early 2026 which utilized Nano Banana models, into roughly 800 clusters in five categories: (1) Social & Viral Sharing, (2) Brand & Marketing Collateral, (3) Educational & Technical Information Media, (4) Product Visualizations & E-commerce, and (5) Architectural & Spatial Designs. We then compare these clusters on 21 features of use, measuring aspects of prompts' (a) editing techniques, (b) artistic style requests, (c) composition, and (d) chatbot interactions. This allows us to describe a baseline of how people are using image generation and editing tools for different use cases---(including growing and emergent use cases which were not possible before Nano Banana)---in a privacy-preserving manner.