on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
https://www.tryai.dev/blog/ai-drawing-arena-colored-pencils-claude-gpt-grok
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.
Why we run these
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:
They are fun, and genuinely informative. Watching a model tackle a loose, open-ended task is a more interesting visual indicator of capability than yet another benchmark number.
They expose the real frontier-vs-open gap. Cheaper open-weight models can absolutely replace the frontier for a lot of execution work, and we will keep reporting on that. But there is also a lot of benchmaxxing out there, and tasks like this cut through it. They genuinely separate frontier capability from the rest….