AI image & video generation guide 2026: all you need to know

I just realized there are still so many people who are not sure which AI image model is good or the best. All they know is they want to generate an AI picture or video.

So, a 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 too, about $0.06 per generation on Kubflow.
2. 🥈 Nano Banana 2 / Pro: Google's flagship models. They used to be the best before GPT Image 2 came out and they're still powerful. As of today I use them as a backup to GPT Image 2, just to compare.
3. 🥉 Z-Image: this one can generate pretty much everything. Really powerful and nearly free, only about $0.01, and it looks really good too. For UGC it's kind of better than Nano Banana, but the downside is you can't use 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. Its capabilities are unlimited, it's truly amazing, and you can generate everything from UGC to Pixar-style animations. Imagination is your only limit. The good thing is you can reference anything you want: videos, images, audio. You can give it a scene clip, tell it what to change, and write in the prompt what the characters are saying, and it comes out better than you'd expect.
2. 🥈 Kling 3.0: still a truly amazing video model. Some people think Seedance took the throne, but I still use Kling in lots of cases, and they just added 4K, which is truly amazing. Whatever your use case is, I'd recommend testing the same prompt on Kling and Seedance and seeing what works better for you.
3. 🥉 Veo 3.1 / Grok video: forget about them for now. They're outdated but still deserve third place, since there's no other good video model. Veo 3.1 is kind of expensive and not worth it as of today in my opinion. Grok is much better, and I see they've been pushing updates lately, but it's early to say. It still looks outdated to me, but be the judge yourself.

Honorable mention for the future: there's a new Alibaba model coming out called HappyHorse-1.0. On paper it looks good, but we'll see. My prediction is it will land somewhere between Kling and Seedance.

A really great tip for 15+ second videos

When you generate videos longer than 15 seconds, you need to think it through to keep the characters and everything else consistent. Don't just plug prompts into a video node and hope the character you described stays the same. The best and cheapest way to do it:

1. Generate 1 image and make sure it's perfect.
2. Use that image as a reference for the other scenes. For example, if you have 10 scenes of 5 to 10 seconds, plug that first perfect image into all 10 and generate one image per scene, like a storyboard.
3. Once you're happy, plug each image into its own video node (Seedance, Kling, whatever) and say what happens in each scene.
4. Combine all the videos, and you have a final video that's about 1:30 long and really consistent.

Another good way is similar, but instead of generating 10 images you generate 1, generate a video from it, extract the last frame of that video, use it as the first frame of the next video, and so on until the video is finished.

You can use all of these models and techniques on Kubflow. I'm the developer behind it, and it's 2 to 3 times cheaper than other AI creative workflow websites :)

Enjoy, I hope it's helpful!