May 7, 2026

Generating good news images

Experimenting with using image generation models to create images from good news stories.

Spent the morning in Rooster's Good News Playground. This is an admin tool I built for generating a good news story plus illustration for the daily newsletter.

I pick a candidate story and the LLM does a neutral extraction, normalizing the copy. Then it generates an image prompt. From there, an editorial illustration and a Southern-voice rewrite render side-by-side, so I can compare providers.

Currently testing OpenAI, Google Gemini ("Nano Banana"), and Hugging Face. Some results are great. Others, not so much. I probably need to tailor my prompt approach to each model.

Today's story: a woman who's spent 14 years collecting donated bicycles and tricycles, then giving them free to families who can't afford them. Pretty cool!

Examples of images created with different image generation models.
Good news experiment examples

Examples of images created with different image generation models.