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- Hacker News
- Perhaps there was something in the prompt or settings preventing this, but I'm surprised (and slightly disappointed) that none of the models approached this the way I would: download an image of the Mona Lisa, run all of the drawing functions many times to construct a forward model of the drawing implements, and attempt to solve some kind of explicit inverse problem through either ML or a classical algorithm to minimize some difference metric. Were they just restricted from running code or are the models unindustrious without a very specific prompt?by traes
- For capabilities reference:
I made a lower effort but similar scaffold for LLMs to do iterative drawing in Nov 2024, with Sonnet 3.5 as the artist: https://paritybits.me/llm-drawing-with-eyes-open/
Quite a difference.
by NiloCK - The way the LLM describes its own work at the end is hilarious.by Athanase000
- Fix this signup error please
https://www.tryai.dev/?error=server_error&error_code=unexpec...
by ms7892 - The most interesting result for me is that they apparently prompted the models to optimize for SSIM, but many of the models trend worse over time. I suppose because viewing the canvas always comes after drawing, and they didn't give "revert to previous" capability as part of the toolkit.
Which in turn kinda jives with my experience of using these models for code: to some extent they only seem to have a concept of "forward", which invariably leads to "write more code to fix previous problems created", rather than taking a step back and removing broken things entirely.
by fastball - Stopping problem at work. I wonder if results would improve if we gave the agents an “undo” or “revert” tool.by d1sxeyes
- GPT-5.6 Sol is the knock out here. Some of those results are really human/charming.
The rectangular smudge tool is a weird tool in the first place, but it's cute to see the models try to use it.
by hombre_fatal - I really like the cabin from Sol. It could be an art piece.by js8
- Claude was clearly 'pushing back' on the coziness of the cabin. But I think it did best with the cat. Grok, I fear, is making a case for euthanasia. It's suffering and I think it would be cruel to let it continue. Someone pull the plug. .by eth0up
- The Grok ones are so weird that they cross into uncanny and surreal. Truly bizarre and capable of eliciting feelings from me, if only bad feelings…
- A few months back, we had a use case to create some SVGs and added this skill: https://github.com/upbrew-tech/svg-creator-skill
I think using this skill, Claude drew it better than the examples given. https://claude.ai/share/bc0867dc-034f-4865-bb71-acb83bfa36a1
by bibin765 - The Grok ones are amusing, almost comically bad. However, whenever I've tried to pass an image creation request to any of the Opus models, it's been far worse, like first week of using Microsoft Paint bad (while ChatGPT would create social media quality images using the same prompts)by bdcravens
- Opus doesn't have access to an image model, while ChatGPT does (it's not multi-modal, but it can prompt OpenAI's image model). So Opus by default is forced to write code to generate images, or generate SVG's as text. That's putting it in a worse situation than the linked article, where all the models were given rudimentary tools.
Give Opus access to an image model, and it will use that to create images just fine just like ChatGPT.
by vidarh - Grok! LOL!
Seriously, what's going on there ? Why is it so different from others? Is it just behind technologically/training wise or it's using something fundamentally different?
by ksd482 - the starry night one is soo funnyby visiondude
- The razor-wire at the bottom for Starry Night was clever, and very Grok. Really shows its military spirit.
Edit: I just don't see the point of redacting the Mona Lisa
by eth0up - Did Elon tell some poor engineer to give grok a prompt injection for drawing,"make it look like one of my childhood drawings!" Just like the Tesla truck?by Ekshef
- They focused a little too much on Grok Imagine.
- Grok 4.5 is...something else.
It performs much better than composer2.5 (while being as fast). It's not Opus, but I think it's not that far off. Definitely better than sonnet for what I've been doing.
On the other hand, I think they probably heavily adapted the training data so that it really is extremely focused on code. I just recently ran my personal "poetry benchmark" on it (where I give it ~850 poems I've written over my life and ask it to comment the corpus as a whole), and it's whack. It tries to write in portuguese (most of the poems are portuguese) and code-switches constantly and mixes up words to the point of making what it writes almost unreadable (e.g. it writes stuff like "You can't QoS that that look for beast poems", in portuguese, all messed up). The quality of the analysis is also quite bad (I'd say it's definitely behind Sonnet).
So I really think they either threw away data that wasn't tied to coding so that they could fine-tune it to that, or somehow they've got such an unbalanced dataset that coding ends up dominating either way. To me, its disastrous performance in this drawing "competition" fits this narrative.
by jorl17 - GPT 5.6 Sol had the best two drawings (rose and starry nights) but even more impressive was how efficient it was RE cost/time/tokens vs Fable (3.4M vs 14.6M / $7.74 vs $161!). OpenAI has quietly innovated around inference - this is will be a growing differentiator even against open models.by jnathsf
- I do think they are going to stretch their lead in value if Anthropic doesn't wake up and stop YOLOing tokens. Kimi is an amazing achievement, but it has the same (or worse) kitchen sink approach as Fable.
At work, even if Fable is technically better I much prefer Sol because it is so much faster and concise.
by lubujackson - As I looked through the images I was unimpressed entirely, at first. But, then I started thinking, these look a little... "childish" to me.
Childish as in... A newish artist who is drawing a concept rather than light / forms (Which is something artists typically do as they understand drawing more and more).
The rose in the vase specifically - some models understood that there was supposed to be shading, reflections, the concept of refraction - others just drew "blue = glass" and "green = stem" and "red = rose".
Really odd to look at, considering if I saw any of these drawings from a human kid, I would say "good job buddy" and put it on the fridge. I'm expecting these to get better as models improve, and perhaps the artistic progression will be there along with it...
- I took the same prompts to Gemini and was stunned by the results. The are completely different from the images shown in the article (and genuinely good art pieces that were generated).by danesparza
- What's interesting is that the way in which they're childish is actually extremely human. In fact, one of the ways that you're often taught to draw more realistically is to stop thinking of the concepts as icons you're drawing the outlines of, and instead sort of blur your eyes and see things as they are: hues and values. In other words, become a camera or a printer that has no idea what it's capturing or printing other than a grid of values. That is how you achieve realism.
The fact that it has clearly iconified these concepts in its mind and is tracing the outlines of the things it thinks/expects to go where is very human.
by ralusek - Grok consistently draws images that, if I were its parent, I would refuse to put on the fridge door.by MarcScott
- Really odd to look at, considering if I saw any of these drawings from a human kid, I would say "good job buddy" and put it on the fridge.
The Grok ones in particular gave me that thought. Most of them really look like what a kid would do when given the same tools, while the other models' output have distinctly more "AI-ness" to them (for lack of a better term.)
by userbinator - I call this "symbol drawing". Beginning artists do this. They think "This is a head, a head is round. This is where eyes go, eyes are shaped like this", and the whole thing ends up being a collage of symbols vs a representation of the space and experience of viewing a face. When I used to be OK at drawing, it was because I forced myself to use touch instead of sight to compose images. So weird to explain, but I'd feel the 3d to get the lighting and such better.
A lot of art that someone smarter than me told me to appreciate seems to follow the pattern of hitting the space and/or experience while minimizing the use of symbols. Impressionistic paintings esp avoid symbols IMHO, while bizzaro picassos abuse symbols outright and still hit the experience they are going for.
by jvanderbot