"Drawing" the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok

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.

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.

They focused a little too much on Grok Imagine.

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

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?

If 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.

That's what makes it an interesting challenge.

Not 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.