Drawing the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok
"Drawing" the Mona Lisa with GPT-5.6, Claude, Gemini, and Grok
We built a drawing arena where GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5, Grok 4.5, and Gemini 3.6 Flash used colored pencil tools to recreate the Mona Lisa and Starry Night. While Claude Fable 5 was the most expensive, it often produced worse results than cheaper models. Surprisingly, every model scored lower at the end of a session than at its peak, proving that more reviewing does not guarantee better art.
In all eight target runs, the final drawing scored below the best the model reached mid-run.
- NichoPaolucci
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...
- jnathsf
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.
- ksd482
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?
- bibin765
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
- bdcravens
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)
- tylerrobinson
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…
- hombre_fatal
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.
- fastball
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.