Comment by tsimionescu
8 hours ago
No, the point is that a general-ish ability to draw good SVGs is a useful ability in itself. People need SVGs for all sorts of purposes, and if AI can generate one for them, that's mostly useful (discussions about art and employment etc notwithstanding).
That said, I think this would correlate relatively little with general programming ability. They're not unrelated, of course, but being able to generate code that paints an accurate + esthetically pleasing image is quite different from generating code that achieves a non-spatial goal.
If people need to generate good-ish SVG why not simply use a specialized model for a much better result and for far cheaper and quicker?
Why do LLMs need to be able to do this as well, but worse, slower and more expensive?
For example I do SVG diagrams to explain architecture and specific data flows in a multi-tier app.
LLMs do a great job because they understand both code and SVGs well.
Edit:
An example for a synth I'm buulding: https://imgur.com/a/U694Ek7
The irony of having to post it as a PNG isn't lost on me...
This is not a strong use case. I could have made this in Microsoft word when I was 13 years old.
Why on earth would you let an LLM do this when it would take you 10 min to do this in Figma or Inkscape or even just Word
3 replies →
Yeah, if you want to generate an aesthetically pleasing SVG, you'd be better off asking a pixel-based image-generation model for "vector art" and then deconstructing it into an equivalent SVG with something like LayerPeeler. https://layerpeeler.github.io/
Agree directionally - even back in sonnet 3.5 days, I was helping some friends by showing them how to create intermediate representations for SVG building blocks mapping to parametrizable functions that can be used to make interactive SVG-rendered visualizations for various medical needs.