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"Drawing" the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok
- LastTrain 2mo agoWhy include Grok when it is clearly not even in the same category as the other three?
- ms7892 2mo agoFix this signup error please https://www.tryai.dev/?error=server_error&error_code=unexpected_failure&error_description=Database+error+saving+new+user#error=server_error&error_code=unexpected_failure&error_description=Database+error+saving+new+user&sb= https://www.tryai.dev/?error=server_error&error_code=unexpec...
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoI think this is just an ad.
- noodlescb 2mo agoIf it is, it's a horrible ad. My main takeaway is that all of them were god awful at image generation and Fable was 20x more expensive and still awful.
- Legend2440 2mo agoWell, your takeaway is bad. This isn't image generation, it's tool use with a digital paintbrush.
- boomskats 2mo agoAnd image tokenisation.
- KolinFirz 2mo agoTell them to draw LeBron James or Heisenberg. Everyone will refuse.
- geroge_kyaw 2mo agoUseless They are not image generation models.
- samuelknight 2mo agoNot useless. LLMs are the most general purpose computer algorithms ever created. They are getting smarter and cheaper at a geometric rate. What is a bad idea today could have useful applications tomorrow.
- munk-a 2mo ago> cheaper at a geometric rate Citation needed - my company is paying more than ever for code generation. I have no reason to believe (given anecdotes) that anyone finds themselves in the opposite situation.
- ssl-3 2mo agoIt keeps getting cheaper and better -- for me. I get a lot more use (read: cheaper per interaction) and much better quality results from the $20 that I spend on this stuff every month than I did several years ago. (And several years before that, it was all essentially unobtanium.)
- beering 2mo agoYou’re paying more in total because the overall cost has gone down. This is normal economics when something useful gets cheaper. If you were to use original GPT-4 to do as much, you’d be paying an order of magnitude more.
- Legend2440 2mo agoThat's what makes it an interesting challenge.
- ksd482 2mo agoGrok! 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?
- Ekshef 2mo agoDid 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?
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoThey focused a little too much on Grok Imagine.
- jorl17 2mo agoGrok 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.
- userbinator 2mo ago"You can't QoS that" sounds like the title of a nerdcore rap song.
- eth0up 2mo agoClaude 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. .
- AlienRobot 2mo agoThe difference in cost is pretty incredible.
- elcritch 2mo agoRather the difference of cost of Claude is pretty incredible. Then again, I guess they gotta make it rain while they can.
- usef- 2mo agoHe mentions they used quite different methods to get to the end-result. I'd love to know how much changing the prompt impacts things: like telling claude to only draw and blend, similar to sol, etc. There's likely not training data for this and Claude seemed to spend a lot of time blending the background.
- NichoPaolucci 2mo agoAs 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...
- danesparza 2mo agoI 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).
- jstanley 2mo agoWere you using the Gemini image generator though? The article is about using LLMs to do drawing via tool calls.
- ralusek 2mo agoWhat'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.
- cj 2mo agoParrots can also sound extremely human, but it’s only mimicry. How do we know the difference?
- taf2 2mo agoWould love to see the results if they had used /goal or similar
- SXX 2mo agoNow add Deepseek, GLM and Kimi :-)
- felixfurtak 2mo agoI just tried with Deepseek and got this for the Mona Lisa .-""-. / \ | _ _ | | (o)(o) | \ /\ / | -- | | \/ | | | / -- \ / / \ \ / / \ \ (__/ \__) It might not have been the most scientific test
- fph 2mo agoLooks more like Munch's The Scream to me.
- ahoka 2mo agoAny of those would be more relevant than Grok.
- tylerrobinson 2mo agoThe 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…
- Razengan 2mo agoNow this is a cool test. Sol's the best in each one, while Grok looks like the work of that person who "fixed" that Jesus painting..
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dizzard 2mo agoI wonder how much better a harness could get for drawing
- thomasfromcdnjs 2mo agoI think a lot better - the best image related stuff I've seen is where the harness is constantly cropping and looking closer at things (likely helps a lot for computer vision in general) - also it would be interesting because the harness could almost have its own "palette" as if it could play with blank squares and different strokes over lapping or blending before applying to the main canvas
- aqfamnzc 2mo agoI'm surprised that the harness wasn't better described here. Is the draw tool really just asking LLMs to provide a set of coordinates/parameters for generating shapes? Honestly, if so, the results are shockingly good. Think of how well a typical human artist would do with such a crude method of applying brushstrokes.
- fwip 2mo agoArticle is AI-written.
- MitziMoto 2mo agoGrok's look like a truly disturbed child. Like the drawings from that kid in "The Ring".
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoGPT-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.
- js8 2mo agoI really like the cabin from Sol. It could be an art piece.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoIts rose is also insane. Not just the shading of the flower but its clever use of the smudge tool to soften the background and then soften the vase so it looked more like glass. And I like how its starry night decided to accentuate the church/steeple in the village backdrop. Pretty cool how it did these with a scrappy little tool palette. What a fun idea.
- js8 2mo agoI found it funny that Fable reinterpreted the Starry Night as "an oil-well in a desert", while Grok went for a "Stalin statue in a prison camp" angle.
- jnathsf 2mo agoGPT 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.
- lubujackson 2mo agoI 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.
- theplumber 2mo agoTo me GPT is quite slow. I use it with max reasoning though but Fable at max as well
- dajonker 2mo agoFor me personally, there is no point in using more reasoning than medium or sometimes high. It just gets so much slower and expensive, meaning that i have to wait longer to evaluate the results and provide feedback or continue to the next task.
- reactordev 2mo agoShould have compared against FLUX Klein and Z-Image Turbo...
- maxall4 2mo agoI very much enjoyed Grok 4.5's rendition of the Mona Lisa as Elon Musk with tentacles.
- bdcravens 2mo agoThe 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)
- vidarh 2mo agoOpus 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.
- wolttam 2mo agoWould be great to see Kimi here.
- roguedemon 2mo agoThat was a good testcase. Pretty cool.
- sashank_1509 2mo agoWhere do these models even have this data to learn from. There must be massive computer use datasets? I have a hard time believing it’s emergent if it’s able to do something this good.
- fastball 2mo agoThe 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.
- d1sxeyes 2mo agoStopping problem at work. I wonder if results would improve if we gave the agents an “undo” or “revert” tool.
- NiloCK 2mo agoFor 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/ https://paritybits.me/llm-drawing-with-eyes-open/ Quite a difference.
- Athanase000 2mo agoThe way the LLM describes its own work at the end is hilarious.
- flintapi 2mo ago[flagged]
- mbmbn 2mo agoShows about the same level of technical mastery that present days painters.
- tulio_ribeiro 2mo agoWeird choice of SSIM/RMSE. By feeding these back into the model, the agent is actively degrading its artistic output. This is only valid for the target reference I think? Alternatively, I think much better results could be had by computing the cosine similarly using DINOv2 ONNX (@xenova/transformers). My guess is that the results are greatly limited by relying on the current metrics. Even better, attach toModelOutput directly to drawTool so it returns the rendered canvas image immediately upon drawing.
- leobg 2mo agoI'm missing some context here. First of all, this is a marketing piece, made for engagement. Second, in production, you would adjust your approach to the model's strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you found that a model does not respond to the tools you are offering, then you would find a way to make it more responsive. Also, we know that different models handle prompts and system prompts differently. So comparing several models from different providers against exactly the same prompt is quite a naive way of exploring the capabilities of those models or comparing them to each other. You may have just happened to “speak the language“ of one model better than that of another. Why would that be the model’s fault and not yours? Third, none of these results mean anything if you do not run each process on each model several times to check for consistency. Your model might just have gotten lucky. This point is even more true when you're talking about a progressive task where one step builds on the previous one. The model might just have painted itself into a corner.
- traes 2mo agoPerhaps 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?
- bibin765 2mo agoA few months back, we had a use case to create some SVGs and added this skill: https://github.com/upbrew-tech/svg-creator-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 https://claude.ai/share/bc0867dc-034f-4865-bb71-acb83bfa36a1
- raybb 2mo agoA year or so ago I was trying to get llms to make pixel art by asking them to create a 2d array of color codes. I'm no prompt guru but they all failed at anything beyond a basic shape. I tried at many resolutions from 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, and maybe a little larger but basically only then quit small ones were even recognizeable.
- vunderba 2mo agoThere’s a related benchmark along these lines that uses an LLM with a discrete “instructive graphic language” to get models to generate Minecraft voxel structures with varying degrees of success. https://github.com/Ammaar-Alam/minebench https://github.com/Ammaar-Alam/minebench
- dehrmann 2mo agoThis is picking the wrong tool for the job twice over. Half of it is seeing if text-to-image mechanics exist in general purpose LLMs, the other half is seeing if they can reason their way about generating the 2d array. Imagine asking this of yourself and doing it through just a train of thought. Yes, I could probably draw a basic smiley face in the color of your choice in a 16x16 without antialiasing in 15 minutes.