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So this is not my experience at all for asking about simple SVG icons for web-pages. Here is one of the examples I have tried for in the past, make a simple cartoon SVG knife for a map icon for a crime map.

https://x.com/CrimeDecoder/status/2080008114615537766

Can see the images for ChatGPT/Claude (Sonnet 5), and Gemini are all quite bad.

Jagged edge of LLMs. How do you explain being able to generate very complicated shapes in the Pelican example but cannot make a much simpler icon without just alluding to it is in the training data?

2 comments

Thanks for sharing another solid data point. I fear you won't get an answer from my experience [0]. Unfortunately, the blog post decided to forgo the very models that I found to be the worst offenders:

> Here is what Qwen3.6-35B-A3B via Openrouter provided for a sloth riding a skateboard: https://imgur.com/a/Dy8fvR5

> Like Grok 4 Fasts attempt at a mushroom in a rowboat, it is barely recognisable as anything despite both Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Grok 4 Fast having no issue with more popular (i.e. benchmarked) examples. [...]

> And here is Opus 4.7 [which simonw claimed to provide a worse pelican vs Qwen], again via Openrouter: https://imgur.com/a/Qus1Enf

Anyone who hasn't witnessed such deltas either hasn't looked at enough examples, a sufficient variety of models, or both. And they are, unfortunately, not limited to "SVGMaxxing", but a wide range of evals.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951229

Does asking for a dagger help?

If you look at the raster image ChatGPT generated, that is fine. It is just this example (and other simple SVG icons I have asked for) result in pretty bad SVGs. It just makes me highly suspicious that the LLMs are learning shape primitives and extrapolating to new shapes, vs just having a big dictionary of prior examples and stitching them together.

  Don't judge the dog's technique. The miracle is that it's dancing.

I would guess most programmers struggle to create SVG icons - I don't find it easy. The average person even more so.

Are we best to assume an LLM is a blind programmer? Any HN comments from blind programmers tasked with creating SVG icons? Only relevant comment I could find from ctoth was about accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7185771

Projecting how you think onto what the LLM is doing or should be doing, is probably a mistake on your part.

I recently spent a little time trying to understand exactly why Gemini was misexplaining $X. $X = {why the generated LaTeX visually didn't match what it was asked to do}. It was enlightening.