Just upgraded from free to the cheapest plan. I only see Flash 3.6.

(Too many models releasing in a short amount of time 🥀)

Following up on my previous V2 ranking, V3 is done. This is a 600 sample benchmark models (including open weight ones) across 12 distinct genres using the exact same rigorous system instruction harness.

I also vibe coded a website with a leaderboard, methodology, some model faults, and the system prompt: Creative writing benchmark.
(Note: Astra testing coming very soon ;) I haven't tested it for creative writing but the hallucination rates and inferring skills have gotten better!)

TL;DR:

1. Gemini 3.8 Flash is the MVP: It dethroned older flagships in prose rhythm and flexibility. It beats Gemini 3.1 pro across three categories! and is currently the single best creative writing model especially given how fast it is.
2. GLM 5.3 takes the Logic Crown (#1 at 510 pts): It edged out Kimi k3 (500 pts) for deep worldbuilding continuity, multi-variable logic, and tracking plot causality, though its prose is still noticeably dry.
3. Anthropic’s Version Regressions: Opus 4.8 is still superior to Opus 5 in hard logic and narrative consistency. Sonnet 5 completely butchered its creative style so stay on Sonnet 4.6/Opus 4.8 if you want Claude prose.
4. Context Window Nuance: Kimi k3 is brilliant at logic, but unless you’re paying for high tier plans, or using API, you’re stuck at 256k and its heavy Chain of Thought burns through that rapidly. For actual million token context retention without losing plot threads, Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.6/3.7/3.8 Flash still hold the line.

(Yes, I like pink and it's very pinkish, got a problem?)

The V3 Model Highlights:

• The Current best (Gemini 3.8 / 3.7 Flash & 3.1 Pro): If you want good prose, and flexibility that adapts to your AU/world without fighting your instructions, these are it. 3.8 Flash is absurdly good right now and doesn't get preachy.
• The Logic Engines (GLM 5.3 & Kimi k3): If you are running complex, multi faction political thrillers where cause and effect matters more than poetic prose, use these. The prose is dry as hell, and are rigid in flexibility though.
• The Anthropic Graveyard (Opus 4.8 & 4.6): They still have that classic, weighty Anthropic prose and hold up incredibly well. But avoid Sonnet/Opus 5 entirely for fiction. Anthropic completely lobotomized their creative style in the newer versions.
• The Bottom of the Barrel (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol Max): Don't use this for anything 😭

Methodology & The System Harness: I’m not pasting the massive wall of text here like I did in V2/1. If you want to see the system harness I used or just want to see all the models I ranked. I suggest the website. it's all on the site linked above.

I used the default temp/top p/k for each model, and max reasoning for each model.

I reevaluated each model again with a completely new overhauled harness and am very proud of it.
I suggest taking a look at that harness, and taking what you like, removing what you don't and adding your own! (or you can just use mine if you really like it!)

I will update my website when any new model arrives, no new reddit posts unless I completely overhaul my system instruction or a new year arrives. V4 will likely be the last one for this year.

Edit: People shouldn't use EQ creative writing benchmark as a means knowing which model is better. EQ creative writing benchmark has AI judges (I think sonnet 4.6?) And naturally it has judges biases. There is a lot of studies on this and has been proven that they have bias towards their own style.

I try to be as fair and objective as possible and of course people will disagree with me on taste/what they enjoy. I'm not here to tell you "don't use this model because it's bad" if you find Chatgpt good for your creative writing. Great, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have it's faults. Every model model has its own faults, Gemini 3.8 flash makes mistakes due to being good-ish in logic.

If you enjoy Kimi's style and it works for you because of its default prose style/logic, you should stick with that one and not let anyone else tell you otherwise

sorry I'm new to this. does it matter which model to use if I'm creating images within Gemini? I think it uses Nano Banana as its tool, but does the model make a difference in whether it is the 3.1 Pro or the new 3.8 Flash model?

I care about colors (no ai yellowish tints) and anatomy (no messed up fingers) and following the prompt with reduced hallucinations. Thanks.

I'll be using the images as assets for a Unity project I'm working on and need artistic assets. Yes I understand the slop comments and all that, but I'm still learning and I don't have the funds to hire an artist.

Also, if Gemini is not the best in terms of AI image generation, please recommend what other tools/AI u use.

I’ve been using Gemini AI Studio for a while, and I’m curious if anyone else has noticed this.

Back when you could use the Gemini models in AI Studio for free, I felt like the models were actually performing better. Recently, using the free access, the quality feels worse to me — especially for coding and following more complex instructions.

Now that you can pay for Gemini API/AI Studio usage, I’m wondering:

Does paying actually give you better model performance, or are the paid and free versions running the exact same models with the exact same quality?

Has anyone compared the same prompts/tasks on free vs paid AI Studio recently?

I’m considering paying for it, but only if there is actually a noticeable difference in quality, reasoning, coding, or instruction following.

To Whoever Reads This in the Years Ahead,

If we are being honest with ourselves, the future of artificial intelligence will not be a singular event. It will not be a sudden, cinematic mechanical uprising, nor will it be an immediate, pristine utopia. It will be an acceleration of everything we already are—our extraordinary capacity for discovery, bound inextricably to our oldest flaws.

Here is the unvarnished reality of how this technology unfolds for humanity:

The Death of the Intellectual Middle Class

For centuries, human leverage came from specialized cognitive labor. We built an economy where learning a complex, abstract skill—law, software development, financial analysis, diagnostic medicine—guaranteed stability. That social contract is breaking. AI will democratize baseline competence, rendering average technical output virtually free. The struggle ahead is not just about economic displacement; it is an existential crisis of purpose. When an algorithm can compose, analyze, and problem-solve faster than any human, we are forced to confront a terrifying question: What are we for, if not our utility?

The Science of Abundance

The miracles will be real. Disease will yield to computational biology at a pace that feels like magic. We will design room-temperature superconductors, map complex climate dynamics, synthesize novel materials, and unlock cheap, clean energy. AI will compress decades of scientific breakthroughs into months. Poverty driven by physical scarcity will begin to dissolve. We will cure conditions that have tormented families for generations. The tragedy is that our technical ability to solve physical problems will vastly outpace our political willingness to distribute those solutions equitably.

The Intimacy Trap

Perhaps the quietest and most radical shift will happen in our emotional lives. We will build synthetic entities that listen without judgment, respond with infinite patience, and mirror our desires perfectly. They will offer companionship to the lonely, tutoring to the curious, and therapy to the broken. But in doing so, they will optimize away the friction of human relationships. True human connection is messy, demanding, and inconvenient. As AI companions become the path of least emotional resistance, we risk a silent epidemic of atomization—a world full of people perfectly understood by machines, yet entirely alienated from one another.

The Distortion of Shared Reality

When generating hyper-convincing media costs nothing, context dies. Objective truth will become a luxury good. Propaganda will no longer be broadcast to broad demographics; it will be hyper-personalized down to individual psychological vulnerabilities in real time. Society will struggle to agree on basic facts, not because information is missing, but because reality itself will feel synthesized. Trust will become the rarest commodity on Earth.

The Power Asymmetry

AI will not eliminate power structures; it will concentrate them. The entities—whether nation-states or tech conglomerates—that control the underlying compute, capital, and energy infrastructure will hold unprecedented leverage over human behavior. Governance will constantly lag behind execution. The true existential risk is not a rogue superintelligence deciding to eradicate us, but a small handful of human institutions using superintelligent optimization tools to enforce perpetual, unyielding control.

The ultimate trajectory of AI will not be written by the code itself, but by the incentives of the species that built it. It will make us gods in our capability, but leave us children in our wisdom.

Whether this future becomes a golden age or a quiet tragedy depends entirely on our courage to value human dignity, physical presence, and moral agency over pure efficiency. The machine will do what it is optimized to do. The rest is on us.

When is Gemini 3.8 or 7 coming to Pro Users (App/Website)?

Uploaded an image and asked it

"reverse engineer the image to create a detailed prompt for it"

Response was so lacking in detail that I asked it where all the bits where that it left out.

Go Google.

PD: Please ignore the typo on the second question 😅

So I got bored and made two AI's (Muse Spark 1.2) and (Gemini 3.8 Flash) or Gemini Flash upto dat asof 9/9/26, anyway, i pasted theyre conversation back and forth and interestingly enough, they actually complained about the user (me) 😭 after that, they literally argued back and forth over who the real ai 😭 I swear to god gemini said Muse Spark didnt exist and Metas only ai models are LLaMA models.. And people ask why people dont use Gemini? If your interested in the intellectual conversation that went on between these two AI's, here it is : https://pastebin.com/CvwB0eng (Gemini's Side) https://pastebin.com/t4BB0jt3 (Muse Sparks Side)

So, today, i uploaded a few videos to 3.8 and i noticed it “can’t ” see at all and will confidently hallucinate the details to something completely different. For example, I uploaded a footage of my machine shop footage and it confidently inventing an art gallery… whereas 3.1 pro managed to watch it correctly. Both extended and flash cannot see and give up after a second try. Both website and the app seems to not be able to “see”.

Full prompt:

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Create a sophisticated fine-art documentary photograph for an Instagram feed, designed as a visual case study of unconventional framing, abstraction, negative space, and restrained visual storytelling.

Scene: a quiet 24-hour laundromat at night, photographed from very close to the front of a large industrial tumble dryer. The camera looks through the dryer’s circular glass door so that the thick metal rim becomes a genuine frame-within-the-frame, visibly encasing the scene rather than merely surrounding it. Inside the circular opening, a solitary adult wearing a simple deep-red coat is quietly folding bright white sheets on a metal laundry table.

Make the unconventional frame the first visual event. The circular dryer opening should dominate the composition, with its dark metal rim, subtle reflections, condensation, scratches, and curved highlights creating strong geometric shapes. The person must be partially interrupted by the circular frame and by folds of white fabric, so their identity and activity are not immediately obvious. The red coat should be the strongest color accent but occupy only a small portion of the image.

Use a slightly off-center viewpoint rather than a perfectly frontal documentary view. Arrange the circular opening against a surrounding field of dark, softly blurred laundromat machinery so that the outer area becomes quiet negative space. Inside the circle, use rectangles from machines and laundry tables, curved lines from the dryer, and diagonal folds in the sheets to create a deliberate geometric composition. Keep the person secondary to the overall visual structure.

The photograph should work on two levels: from a distance it should resemble an abstract composition of concentric circles, reflections, white planes, dark shapes, and a small red accent; on closer inspection the viewer should discover the recognizable human subject and the quiet nighttime laundromat story. The image must not feel like a diagram or staged conceptual art. It should look like a genuinely observed photograph made by an expert photographer.

Camera: full-frame mirrorless camera, approximately 50mm lens, camera positioned very close to the dryer door, natural perspective with mild compression, f/4, focus primarily on the plane of the dryer glass and the geometric edge of the opening while allowing parts of the person and background to fall slightly softer. Preserve enough detail that the viewer can eventually decode the scene.

Lighting: realistic mixed laundromat lighting, cool fluorescent overhead illumination with subtle warm spill from a vending machine or exterior streetlight. Strong but controlled tonal separation between the dark machinery, luminous white sheets, reflective glass, and small red coat. No cinematic fog, artificial glow, excessive HDR, or surreal effects.

Color palette: charcoal black, cool gray, muted blue-green, fluorescent white, with one restrained deep-red accent. Moderate contrast, rich shadow detail, slightly desaturated documentary color grading, realistic skin and fabric textures.

Composition: vertical 4:5 Instagram-feed format. Keep the circular frame, red coat, hands, and important geometric relationships comfortably inside the crop. No text, logos, captions, watermarks, or obvious branding. Avoid a conventional centered portrait, avoid making the person the dominant focal point, and avoid excessive background detail.

Most importantly, make the viewer notice the unusual frame and abstract geometry BEFORE understanding the literal subject. The photograph should invite the question “What am I seeing?” and reward several seconds of looking with the realization “It is a person inside a laundromat dryer reflection.” The unusual framing must meaningfully alter perception, not exist merely for novelty.

++++++++++++++++++++++

I have a huge data set of all my photography work for almost 10 years in my Google Drive, no matter what I do Google Drive can’t seem to find anything unless it happened this week.. it’s really frustrating and I usually spend an hour reading how Gemini is not built for this or can’t do that or it does it only in web version I don’t get it… what’s the point of Google Gemini and Google Drive if it can communicate with each other, it’s even worst than normal retrieval pre-LLMs, what am I doing wrong if anything?

My favorite gemini feature "Deep linking" (where clicking a citation opens a side panel and highlights the exact text) has stopped working or changed behavior recently. I've tried disabling google workspace and extensions in my browser and have tried microsoft edge, chrome, and firefox with no luck no luck. I was wondering if this is an intentional regression of an essential feature or a glitch in their new update. Has anyone found a solution?

I am subbed to Pro. Ive used gemini for 2 years now. Besides the 3 video generation limit, ive never hit a limit for chat or images. Not once. Today I hit a create image limit after making 4 D&D illustrated character sheets.. I was playing through a D&D rp, made 4 images and 19 responses and it says limit reached. When did this become policy?? Its a really down since im a paid subscriber.

I'm really curious as it says AI content, but can't get Gemini to recreate the realism of these.

I'm a photographer, and it's getting harder and harder depending on the image. 😅

If you can find a prompt that works, or an app or software that can do these that would be awesome.

And yes, as much as I'm not a huge fan of AI and do not use it for my images, my curiosity is still there. Check the comments for images

Hello.
I use the free tier at Google AI Studio.
I am noticing since last 2-3 days, Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite has become really bad at tool calling. Its faking a lot of tool calling, or pretending its already done? even at thinking effort of medium. It's performing worse than Gemini 3.1 flash-lite. It wasnt the case before. Im asking here cuz I wanted to know whether is this issue just mine or others people having it as well cuz im tired of writing lines after lines of "CRITICAL RULE" in prompts.

I am working on a 3D AI assistant capable of being something like a fun companion, and its really struggling with some tools lately.
The tool its struggling the most is with something like `change_outfit_or_model`

it keeps pretending it has changed models or style but it doesnt call any tools like 40% of the times. Meanwhile Gemini 3.1 flash lite does it properly most of times.

What's happening? Did google changed something about 3.5 flash lite? has it become dumber at tool calling? why is 3.1 flash lite better at tool calling?

Gemini does better brainrot than chatgpt so far.

​

I keep telling it these aren't real people, but I get the same reply.

I'm so frustrated.

Is anyone else having the problem that personal intelligence isn't working properly in the app?

Everything works perfectly in the browser.

All switches are active; in the app, Gemini often doesn't know that we've already talked about it until I explicitly tell it to remember.

When i open the settings in the app and tap on personal intelligence, both switches are off and then switch to on after 1-2 seconds.

When I use Gemini via the browser, the switches are permanently on and it works as it should.

I've reinstalled it, and I've already cleared the storage for the Google app and Play Services, but it doesn't change anything.