https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
There's usually a reasonably strong correlation between thinking level and visual quality of the pelican. This is the first time I've seen that correlation appear to break - more reasoning tokens doesn't seem to produce an obviously better SVG.
I'm guessing it's optimizing for "efficient"/less verbose output?
Edited to make clear what it looks like to me and what I was looking for.
If you look at the code for each of these (and probably most across models), you can see that the drawing elements are organized by concept. Presumably, this helps accuracy by keeping attention on one concept at a time, but you end up with a stack of conceptualized objects and lose the ability to interleave things.
No doubt these could all do better with a more thorough and specific prompt that coached them away from that technique, but otherwise it's a very subtle detail that a "thinking" process needs to stumble upon independently.
And the same reason Claude has all its notorious Claudisms in prose.
The shorter and vaguer a prompt you give to an LLM, the more it fills in further details using associations they've developed through training. These are ley lines that the models gravitate towards. Diffusion models too.
It's why lazy AI use for creative work always comes across as lazy in the wild and always will.
When you use AI for "creative" purposes yourself, it feels like magic to see a pelican riding a bicycle at all, and you're impressed by all those cool details it added. But then 10, or 100, or 10M people throw more or less the same trivial prompts at it and we start to recognize all those "ley line" associations fill in the gaps the same way again and again and again.
- simple prompt for complex output (bad)
- complex prompt for simple output (bad)
- simple prompt for simple output (good)
- complex prompt for complex output (.... is this good or bad?)
There's a blog post in this for sure. And a classic joke.
Btw, loved your work with Django!
One store has four brands that range from $2.99 (on sale from $3.29) to $7.99 (on sale from $9.59). Another nearby store has a single brand at $9.49 that's marked as local.
Given this information, which store likely has the less expensive food?
Furthermore, it was her marker for inflation - she knew what blueberry pie filling cost the previous month, the previous year, ... and many previous years to that.
She lived in a small town in the rural south that had a general store - any grocery store was a forty minute to two hour drive away...
It was a consistent thing that she could track and measure across the months and decades and compare when shopping (is this a store that I get only the essentials for the next week or is this a store that I should stock up on and come back to?).
So too is the pelican, or the raccoon with a radio in a where's Waldo style drawing. It's something to measure across models that is consistent.
Fortunately, none of the stores caught onto my grandmother's preference for blueberry pie filling.
One might worry about pelican maxing... or raccoon maxing... and Goodhart's law gets into the question of "do LLM testers use that for testing too?"