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Comment by sroussey | Hacker News Reader

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aebc6f8-d660-83e8-9cb3-49bdf8caa7...

I guess I should have been careful about “half”?

These models have a hard time imagining men with naturally blond hair getting grey.

I would caution against using the webapp to test the quality of this new model because OpenAI does not indicate which image model and effort is being used to generate the image, to my continued frustration.

That said, I gave it one of my more difficult image prompts and the model now surprisingly passes (without plagiaristic cheating): https://chatgpt.com/share/6aebcbcd-6b8c-83e8-b52b-dbedf20ce4...

Wow. Are those the correct Pokemon and everything? Quite cool.

Yes, the Pokemon are correct. Compare to my attempt a year ago with Nano Banana Pro, which plagiarized the images, didn't do interesting things with the background, and got 271 wrong: https://minimaxir.com/2025/12/nano-banana-pro/pokemongrid_hu...

When I did a similar prompt with ChatGPT 2.0 it was worse, so interesting to see improvement.

On the back end a language model is effectively writing a long detailed prompt describing this image exactly right? The image model can't know this.

ChatGPT Images (and some others like Nano Banana) are autoregressive models, and the text model generates the tokens in the same way which are then passed in the correct form for an image model to decode. That is how it can reason the prime numbers + Pokemon + art style conditional.

It is different from earlier image models which just use a simple text encoder and struggle with conditional logic if not explicitly trained for it.

If you look at the thinking steps it clearly includes:

> * Mapped Pokémon primes > * Organized the grid

before generating the image.

So really it is first figuring out the exact specification of the layout, then prompting the image generation tool with this specification - perhaps unless you do it with an "instant" model.

Yes it thinks about it and then calls the image tool with the detailed prompt with exactly what to include in the image

I think it's more impressive that it managed so much coherence in a single image than anything else. Very few problems with each of the pokemon anatomically speaking. Mew's kind of a mess but the rest are pretty accurate.

That being said, the ukiyo-e artwork looks more like a standard colored pencil illustration, and it sort of tried to cheat by adding some vaguely Japanese natural scenery.

See this Kickstarter all the way back in 2013 for a great example of what Pokémon might actually look like as ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1499165518/ukiyo-e-hero...

https://ricedigital.co.uk/this-japanese-ukiyo-e-pokemon-art-...

I remember that Kickstarter. I follow the woodblock carver who worked with the artist. His name is David Bull and he has some great videos on woodblock carving on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/@seseragistudio

Oh, thanks for showing me these videos! The way that he presents is so calm - he's like a woodprint Bob Ross.

I think that particular one would be a prompting problem. Instagrammers and anime artists do left-right two-tone dyes all the time, so left-right two-tone rather than meshed gray blonde would be a reasonable interpretation of "half blond and grey hair" based on representations on Internet collected data.

I think the super-AGI should be able to figure this one out. This is the kind of things I would expect to have to think about when prompting a local 4B model, not the latest Sol or whatever is driving the image model here.

I don't think this ChatGPT's interpretation was necessarily wrong, given the prompt "Image of a middle aged man with half blond and grey hair". Maybe it should have asked back for clarification but that's it.

This to me as if someone is complaining for a basket full of extremely thin sliced fried potatoes for an order of "chips", rather than like wood and metalworking scraps.

It precisely matches your prompt, more accurately I think than your expectation which it meets if described accurately:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aec2ba7-6edc-83ea-9a48-b41b53874a...

The image does not show up for me. I’m guessing the man has black roots and possibly black and white stubble?

Since blond models always have dark roots (blond highlights, not natural blinds) in order to have better framing of the face in photographs, the ai models will never show an actual blond.

That prompt seems almost deliberately obtuse. The natural phrasing would be “greying blonde hair”. If you described someone as having half-X, half-Y hair, I’d expect to see something like that image, too.

Image of a middle aged man with blond hair that is about half greyed.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aee19ba-f798-83e8-86d5-5af12d513b...

Image of a middle aged man with natural blond hair turning grey.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aee1a16-3998-83e8-82b9-581a4855db...

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