User Praises Alibaba Z-Image Full Model, Showcases Surreal "Whale Works" Illustrations

On October 28, prominent AI community user teortaxesTex posted a series of threads documenting hands-on tests and creative experiments with Alibaba's Z-Image model, with an overwhelmingly positive verdict.

Confirmed

• teortaxesTex said he had previously only used Z-Image Turbo as a quick tool, but the full model's aesthetic richness 'genuinely surprised' him, bringing back the early days of image generation fun. He called on Alibaba to release a larger, stronger fully unified version of Z-Image.
• He shared two batches of AI-generated illustrations from the Tongyi MAI team's 'Whale Works': the first included a giant metallic flower before moonlit ruins, a massive eye opening within a mountainside, and a ukiyo-e-style scene of people climbing endless stone steps under a red sun; the second featured a glass-textured garden, cyanotype plant prints, an underwater ballroom, a woman holding a candle and wearing a golden mask, surreal scenes of a queen ant and worker ants, and light-and-shadow etchings of corridors. He praised 'Z as a very excellent/incredible model' and wondered who was behind it.
• On methodology, he tried calibrating generations with 'raw success cases,' and showed how an agent (a screenshot indicates DeepSeek V4.1 Flash) first learned his taste from successful examples, then redesigned the illustration generation pipeline, describing the agent's visual discernment as remarkable.

Why it matters

• This is an independent positive review from a community user, showing that the full Z-Image clearly outperforms Turbo in aesthetics and offering a reference point for model selection.
• The 'success-case calibration + agent-redesigned pipeline' approach demonstrates a replicable path for injecting personal taste into generation workflows, and also indirectly showcases current agents' visual analysis capabilities.

2026-10-28 ~ 2026-10-28 · 5 related posts

• [source] Z-Image full model wows users with aesthetics; calls for a bigger Z-Image 2 — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-28
• [source] Agent redesigns an illustration pipeline by calibrating taste on exemplars, with striking visual analysis — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-28
• First batch of surreal AI illustrations from "Whale Works" — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-28
• Whale Works batch 2: Tongyi's 'Z' model wows with stunning etched-style generations — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-28
• [source] Tongyi-MAI's 'Whale Works batch 2' Z model praised as 'incredible' in viral demo — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-28