30-step image edit test: GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst drifts most, Ideogram 4.5 holds up
Artificial Analysis ran the same photo through four frontier image-editing models for 30 consecutive edits (light the fire, add a sofa, repaint the walls, swap day for twilight, and more) to compare multi-turn consistency. It says Ideogram 4.5 and FLUX 3 edit locally, leaving 95% or more of the image essentially untouched on small changes such as adding a vase of tulips, while leaderboard-topper GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst re-renders most of the image on every edit, keeping only about a fifth unchanged so colour and detail shifts compound over turns. Nano Banana 2.1 sits in between: edits stay local but the rest of the image shifts slightly and gradually darkens. The group notes its leaderboard scores single edits, so this was its own test of what happens when 30 changes stack up.
Multi-turn consistency is becoming a practical bottleneck for image-editing models, and single-edit rankings may not capture how much an image degrades across a long edit sequence.