If you regularly stare at the Steam charts to see if there’s anything new and exciting to play, you may have noticed an odd little “game” called Banana. It has quickly become a huge success and, as of this writing, sits at the number three spot with over 400,000 concurrent players. It’s a simple idle clicker game, like many before it, so what’s making players flock to what amounts to a static screen of a huge banana?

The promise of sweet, sweet cash, that’s what. It’s an extremely bare-bones title that has you repeatedly clicking on a banana. That’s pretty much it, though there’s a twist. As you click and click on the tropical fruit, there’s a chance of a banana sticker dropping into your Steam inventory. These bananas come in all different designs, from silver-encrusted variants to one that looks like it's glitching out from a hack.

aaladin66, Pony, Sky, AestheticSpartan

Because the bananas show up in your inventory, they can be sold on the Steam Marketplace. Rare bananas have already gone for as much as $1,400, though the average payout is somewhere in the $0.02 range. One of the developers called it a “legal infinite money glitch” in an interview with Polygon. “Users make money out of a free game while selling free virtual items,” he continued.

The money earned goes into a Steam wallet, which can then be used to purchase games. So these bananas are basically NFTs, only without the blockchain. People are buying and selling them like crazy, like weird fruit-based trading cards. Forget the banana stand: it looks like there’s money in just the facsimile of a banana.

If the idea of spending all day clicking on a fake banana in front of a vomit-green background doesn’t do it for you, the developers sell inventory bananas outright for $0.25 a pop. The game itself, however, is free to play. The devs deny allegations that the clicker is some sort of scam or a Ponzi scheme, simply saying that it’s “pretty much a stupid game.” Idle clickers, after all, are nothing new.

As for the future, the designers have teased updates, including a way to use inventory items to change the way the plain in-game banana looks. There also might be a minigame coming down the pike, as well a shop upgrade that lets players exchange multiples of the same banana for a unique drop. One thing is a near certainty. The massive popularity of Banana is sure to inspire a whole bunch of copycats. May I humbly suggest a pizza slice as something to click over and over.

Getty has partnered up with Picsart, a popular photo-editing platform, to build an AI image generator that’s entirely trained on licensed stock images. The companies are calling it a “responsible, commercially-safe” alternative to current platforms. Images created by the model will have full commercial rights, which should address concerns about AI-generated images violating copyright laws.

The service will only be available to paid Picsart subscribers and the whole thing recalls Adobe’s Firefly AI model. That generator is also trained on stock images, though not exclusively. Adobe recently outraged users by updating its terms of service to indicate that it could access and use people’s work to train AI models. The company quickly amended the terms of service once the backlash started spreading.

Picsart and Getty hope to avoid any backlash by sticking to fully licensed stock images, so regular Picsart users won’t be at risk of having their creations snatched up by the model for training and generation purposes. “It allows creators to bring their visions to life while maintaining the highest standards of commercial safety,” Grant Farhall, CPO at Getty Images, wrote in a blog post.

It also looks like Getty is playing fair with this one, for those worrying about the work of professional photographers being co-opted. We reached out to the company and a rep said that it is "compensating creators included in the dataset on an annual basis." That's something at least!

The Picsart x Getty Images model releases later this year, though there’s no concrete launch date. It’ll be accessible via Picsart’s API services.