For the past two years I’ve done a fun little expirement – using GenAI to create illustrations from the Twelve Days of Christmas song. You can check out the 2023 and 2024 editions to see how things have progressed. In previous years, I mostly just kept things simple – passing only the day’s gift as the prompt:

partridge in a pear tree two turtle doves three French hens four calling birds five golden rings six geese a-laying seven swans a-swimming eight maids a-milking nine ladies dancing ten lords a-leaping eleven pipers piping twelve drummers drumming 

Which is absolutely not ideal at all, but part of the fun was seeing how the various tools handled it. This year I decided to give the engines a bit of direction by prefixing it with a request to base the results on the song, for example:

You will generate an image based on one day from the Twelve Days of Christmas song: twelve drummers drumming 

In general, I did not change any settings, so for example, Meta produced portrait sized images and I’m sure I could have tweaked it, but I left it as is. In cases where the engine output multiple results, I used my best judgement and picked what I thought was the best.

Last year, nearly every service did not like "eight maids a-milking". None of the services blocked it this year.

Once again, numbers are a problem. I’d ask for X of Y and generally get X+1, X-1, or not even close. The services did better, but still struggled.

This year I tested with:

• Bing – Bing did really good in the past and for some reason did horrible this year. Like, shockingly bad. It reminded me of the first results from GenAI a few years back. I’m not sure what went wrong here but they just dropped the ball.
• Meta – Meta made some stunningly beautiful images but also universally seemed to ignore my prompt requesting it be Christmas based. I tried tweaking it a bit (removing the colon and wrapping the day portion in a quote) but it didn’t help.
• Nano Banana Pro – this was the clear winner in my opinion. I used the Pro version which is not free, so that’s something to consider when comparing results. I didn’t actually pay though, I get credits as a Google Developer Expert.
• No Adobe Firefly this year. You get 10 generations for free, but I need 12. Oh well.

For each image, you can click for the larger, original image.

Bing

Meta

Pay special attention to number 3, I loved that. And for option 4, there were a few options more "Christmas-like", still not great, but I love corvids.

Nano Banana Pro (Gemini)

Header Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

Raymond Camden