Ai image & Video generation guide 2026 - all you need to know

I just realized there are still so much people who are not sure which AI image model is good/best, all they know is they want to generate AI picture/video

So quick guide as of today:

Best Image models and use cases

1. 🥇GPT Image 2 - Best overall today, nothing comes close, really good at realistic UGC images, Animations, product images or just for fun.

Really cheap, about 0.06$ on Kubeflow for 1 generation

2.🥈 Nano banana 2/PRO - They are googles flagship model, they used to best before GPT Image 2 came out, still powerful. as of today i use it as backup to GPT Image 2 (just to compare)

3. 🥉 Z-image - This one is for NSFW Freaks, can generate everything..... Really powerful and nearly FREE, only 0.01$ and looks really good too, for UGC it's kinda better then Nano Banana but downside is you cant use your reference images
   
   

There is also seedream 5.0 but it's just okay in my opinion

>>Best video models and use cases

1. 🥇 Seedance 2.0 - Brand new Chinese model, capabilities of it is unlimited, it's truly amazing and you can generate everything from UGC to Pixar animations. Imagination is your only limit.
   
   

Good thing about it is you can reference anything you want, like video, images, audio.. for example yesterday i generated shutter island movie scene, where i referenced movie scene clip and told it to make actors jacked like on steroids and in prompt referenced what actors are talking about... it came out better then i expected (you can see that video on my profile)

2. 🥈 Kling 3.0 - Still truly amazing video model, some people think seedance took the throne but i still use kling in lots of cases, for example seedance is really struggling with copyrighted content (not always tho as you saw) Kling just doesnt care, i generated Spongebob intro with it, and you can always find use it of + they just added 4K and it's truly amazing, for whatever your use case is i would recommend test same prompt on kling and seedance and see what works better for you
   
   

3. 🥉VEO 3.1 / Grok video - forget about them for now, it's outdated af but still deserves 3rd place since there is literally no other good video model, VEO 3.1 kinda expensive and not worth anything as of today in my opinion. Grok is much better, i see they were pushing updates lately but early to say, still looks outdated for me but be the judge yourself
   
   

Honorable mention for future: There is new alibaba model coming out, called HappyHorse-1.0, on paper looks good but we will see, my prediction it will be somewhere between Kling and Seedance.

Also really great tip: When generating 15+ sec videos you need to think it through to make characters and everything consistent. Dont just plug prompts into video node and hope for best that described character will be same. Best and cheapest way to do it is:

Generate 1 image and make sure that's perfect > Reference that image to other scenes, for example you have 10x 5-10sec scenes, for all 10 scenes plug that first perfect image and generate 10 images for each scene, like storyboard. once you are happy plug each image to it's individual video node (seedance, kling whatever) say what is happening in each scene > combine all videos and you have final video that is 1:30min long and it's really consistent!

Other good way is also kinda similar but instead of generating 10 images, you generate 1 > Generate video > extract last frame of video > input it in first frame of new video generation and etc.. until video is fully finished!

you can use all of those models and techniques on kubflow, i am developer behind it. it's 2-3x cheaper then any other AI creative workflow website :)

Enjoy! I need to post blog of it too, hope it will be helpful!