Article URL: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/ai-drawing-arena-colored-pencils-claude-gpt-grok Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998404 Points: 79 # Comments: 32

Four frontier models, a blank canvas, and colored pencils. We tracked every stroke, dollar, and output as they tried to draw the Mona Lisa. We built a drawing arena: hand a model a blank white canvas and a set of colored-pencil tools, then get out of the way. The model sets a color, tip width, and pressure, lays down batches of strokes, smudges to blend, erases, and calls view_canvas to see its own work and decide what to fix. It either reproduces a target image or draws from a text prompt. We ran four vision models, GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5, Grok 4.5, and Gemini 3.6 Flash, across two targets (the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Starry Night, both scored objectively) and five open-ended prompts, for 28 drawings total. We'll cover tool use, cost, output, and whether the models actually improved their work, with our opinion at the end. A quick note on why we're doing this, because our last one of these (models making music videos) kicked off a good discussion where some folks read it as us promoting the creativity or artistic ability of models. These are not objective tests of model capability. They are deliberately open-ended, fuzzy tasks. Here is why we personally keep running them: The whole harness is open source at github.com/hershalb/canvas-arena. Point it at any target image or a text prompt and run it yourself. The models could see the target the whole time and were scored on structural similarity (SSIM) to it. We show the SSIM scores below. "An elderly fisherman's weathered face, warm late-afternoon sun, deep wrinkles and stubble" "A beautiful sunset over a calm ocean, orange-to-violet sky, silhouetted horizon"