If you've tried to generate an image of a specific real person — a public figure, an athlete, a celebrity — you've probably hit a wall: some models simply refuse. The two that come up most are Google's Nano Banana (Gemini image) and xAI's Grok Imagine, and they behave very differently on this exact task.
Here's the practical difference, and how to get a usable result either way.
Nano Banana produces excellent, photoreal images and is superb at edits and product shots. But its safety policy is conservative about named real people and public figures — requests that identify a specific celebrity are frequently refused or genericized, so you get 'a man in a jersey' instead of the person you asked for.
Grok Imagine has the most permissive content policy of the mainstream image models on real-person and celebrity likenesses, which makes it the practical choice when the whole point of the image is that it looks like a specific person.
The trade-off is that for non-person work — clean product photography, logos, typography — a model like Nano Banana, Flux or Recraft is usually the stronger pick.
Terminal X encodes this exact routing rule: when a prompt names a real person, it routes the image to Grok (and, for likeness accuracy, can first pull reference photos so the result actually resembles the person). When the request is a generic or product image, it routes to the higher-fidelity model instead. You don't have to know which model refuses what — the router does.
| Nano Banana | Grok Imagine | |
|---|---|---|
| Named real people | Often refused / genericized | Allowed (most permissive) |
| Photoreal quality | Excellent | Very good |
| Product / non-person | Excellent | Good |
| Best for | Edits, products, scenes | Real-person & celebrity likenesses |
Among mainstream models, Grok Imagine has the most permissive policy on real-person and celebrity likenesses, so it's the practical choice when the image needs to look like a specific person. Terminal X routes real-person image prompts to it automatically.
Its safety policy is conservative about named public figures, so it often refuses or genericizes the request. It's still a top pick for edits, products, and non-person scenes.
Or skip the comparison shopping: Terminal X routes one prompt to the right model automatically — and runs several in parallel when a job needs more than one.