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

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...

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.

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.

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?

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…

Should have compared against FLUX Klein and Z-Image Turbo...

Fix this signup error please

https://www.tryai.dev/?error=server_error&error_code=unexpec...

Would love to see the results if they had used /goal or similar

Why include Grok when it is clearly not even in the same category as the other three?

I think this is just an ad.

I wonder how much better a harness could get for drawing

Claude 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. .

The difference in cost is pretty incredible.

Useless They are not image generation models.

Now add Deepseek, GLM and Kimi :-)

Now 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..

Article is AI-written.

Tell them to draw LeBron James or Heisenberg. Everyone will refuse.