Comment by apwheele

8 hours ago

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?

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apwheele

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Topfi  6 hours ago

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951229

robocat  7 hours ago

Does asking for a dagger help?

  • apwheele  7 hours ago

    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.

    • robocat  6 hours ago 

        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.