Okay WOW, your comment cued me to look back through Lesson 1’s notebooks and I found .predict and .fit was being used on the images retrieved from using next(batches) instead of on the batches themselves. It also made me realize the difference between .predict and .predict_generator, and how predict_generator accepts inputs from a data generator, while .predict accepts inputs from just the data.
I spent way too much time figuring this out lol. Feel pretty dumb.