Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition (side-view, 2d, biking right, flat ground beneath, etc)? I don't see any of that detailed in the prompt, yet they all seem to generate roughly the same image of differing quality.
If you look at bike product photography it's always drive side facing the camera, which means front wheel on the right. If I had to guess this is probably where this comes from
Don't know if that's ever possible to know though unless you train a model from scratch but remove all bike product photography and adjacent materials from the training data?
The more generic your prompt, the more generic the response. It's a regression to the "mean" of the training data aka GIGO for AI.
It's like when you ask your average person off the street to draw a house - it'll almost always be square with a triangle roof, one door, and two windows.
In the pelican/bike example, it's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating snowball too. If the earliest examples were bike left-to-right, flat ground, etc. then they are also being scraped up in future LLMs.
Well, all the LLMs are being trained on previous pelicans, so they look the same.
It’s pelicans, all the way down.
as a kid I did them like this. nobody told me to do that. are we all so similar?
The adults brainwashed us
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/
https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/
I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life.
There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me.
A medium blog post says
> Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
Oh I’d forgotten that scene until now. I remember being so, maybe not creeped out, but feeling shifted out of time and having a lot of philosophy I’d read finally click. “Oh, but I wouldn’t notice if this reality wasn’t real, fish not knowing about water, etc.”
Tesla had the same thought. He called himself an automata: "entirely controlled by the forces of the medium" It inspired him to create the first remote control vehicle.
Westworld is such a time capsule.
It's not even that old - but back when it was aired, an AI that can not just string together coherent sentences, but produce coherent reactions in novel, fully unintended contexts, like Maeve was doing there? It was totally a sci-fi premise.
Now we have AIs capable of that and more, and no one bats an eye.
Indeed: “Our hosts began to pass the Turing test within the first year.”
Required sci-fi suspension-of-disbelief in 2017, and then at some point in the last few years we just blew by that one.
Later seasons of the show were much less dramatically satisfying, but also played out the consequences of the science of artificial intelligence demonstrating as a side-effect that human intelligence and free will might have as much of an uncertain foundation as that of machines.
How much data from the Panopticon, how many parameters would it take to train a model that could predict your responses?
I think the turing test is still very much load-bearing — if you know what I mean.
It's just the simplest most recognizable form of a house. Like how a smiley face is so generic and simplistic but everyone will know what it represents. Just two dots and a line yet it's easily and unambiguously understood to represent a human face and a happy emotion.
Not when rendered via POV-Ray:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-rayt...
I plan to update it with more pelicans from all the models released since.
(Spoiler alert: They haven't improved much since then).
Ohh, horizontal wheels. They’re about as good as I expected, models have pretty bad spatial awareness. I would expect Fable to be a bit better than old models, though.
Wow, I actually had this exact idea. I was specifically curious as to how well a given LLM could understand a DSL that hasn't changed much in a couple decades and doesn't have nearly as many examples to learn from online. Seems like it did alright, all things considered.
I wonder how a multi-modal model would do with a harness and tool calling? Specifically a "render" command that produced an image output enabling it to iterate. (Well I see you did this manually with gemini 2.5 pro but I still think it would be interesting to explore various harness setups.)
> GPT-5.1 Codex
> monstrosity
What are you talking about? That's clearly a sci-fi pelican on a hoverboard (successor of the humble bicycle) wearing a visor. Truly visionary.
It's really interesting, isn't it? They almost always cycle from left to right - but I have had a few which cycle in the other direction.
The 2D / flat ground feels reasonable for a SVG, which implies a vector illustration.
It's my impression that it's common in western culture, where text is read left to right, and timelines are visualized as going from left to right, to also animate things going from left to right, since westerners thus have an instinct that "right = forward", so it "feels right" (familiar). I wonder to which degree this is reflected in the training data? And if you'd be more likely to get left-facing pelicans if you prompted it in Hebrew, Arabic or another right-to-left language?
Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.
I was going to ask the exact same question earlier but deleted it after thinking “I’m sure Simon has done some sort of discussion on this.” Since it does seem novel to you, too, it would be really interesting to read more about this phenomenon.
Search Google Images for "bicycle". Almost all bicycle product shots are staged the same way: side view, going left-to-right. It makes sense to me that given that skew in the training data, the model grounds itself in the bicycle.
and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike - if you want to inspect or admire a bicycle you look at the right side, as you might look under the hood of a car.
(Why the drivetrain is on the right, I don't know. But most bike parts follow open standards so it's quite entrenched.)
I can’t tell you why it’s always on the right, but it’s always on the same side because of network effects.
Bicycle frames are not fully symmetric left-right because you need things like a mount point for the derailleur hanger, and optionally affordances to keep the chain off the stays when the wheel is removed.
Those things have to be on the same side as the chain. Bikes designed for disc brakes additionally need a mount point for the brake caliper on the opposite side from the chain.
Additionally, rear wheels are not symmetric: the spokes on the chain side connect to the hub closer to the plane of the rim. That is, they are more perpendicular to the wheel’s rotational axis than spokes on the opposite side (which is why you should always mount a single pannier on the chain side). This asymmetry is to provide space for the gears.
So once the industry decided to put the chain on the ride, you can’t very well make a group set designed for a left chain if you want it to work on the vast majority of frames.
Since most languages read from left to right, rightward movement tends to read as forward progression. So when showing a bicycle in side profile, having it face right feels more naturally like it’s moving forward.
> and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike
While I'm sure this factors into things for advertisements for bike components, there is also just a general preference that westerners have for left-to-right motion. Not just in bike ads, but all ads with (or suggesting) movement. And also not just ads, but movies where directors believe left-to-right motion is associated with progression and right-to-left motion is regressive.
Research has shown that people like to walk counterclockwise (right to left) through supermarkets, which is why they are arranged like this for maximum profit.
Product shots yes, people riding them its more like 50/50. Also if you search for a specific bicycle race you'll find more going right to left.
The canonical view of a bicycle is facing right. Usually, people want to draw/photograph/depict the side of the bicycle with the running gear, which is on the right side of the frame for historical reasons.
The thing that distinguishes pelicans from other birds does so most strongly in profile. If you're looking straight at one, the throat pouch would be hidden by the beak.
I bet if it instead had something to do with black widow spiders we'd find that we're most often looking at the bottom of the spider's abdomen, regardless of whatever non-spider-like activity is supplied.
Yes. It's because you are asking it to generate an image of a pelican riding a bicycle. If someone asked you to draw a pelican riding a bycycle, would you interpret that to mean using 3d photorealism? LLMs follow conventions. The convention for an animal riding a bike is to create a childish 2d line drawing.
well it is svg, it is doing it from circles and lines as primitives, it wants to do it simply and kind of builds the whole thing hierarchically. Making it 3d is way more complicated (as the POV example shows) and the prompt doesn't say 3d anyway
I’m a firm believer in pelicanmaxxing.
They’re all so close in proportions.
Sun is missing a few rays and not wearing sunglasses.
Yes, I do a thing where I ask the machine to generate responses in the form of a lizard talking to a cat. The lizard is always a green gecko and the cat is always orange, which I never specify.
Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition
Because they're computers. They don't have an imagination and the ability to create things from whole cloth the way humans do.
Much like a mother pelican, they regurgitate what they've been fed.