Comment by simonw
4 hours ago
This is SVG, but recent Anthropic models have got extremely good at other forms of visual data.
Here's a Blender model I had Claude Opus 5.5 create: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blender-viewer?url=https%3A%...
And here's some animated pixel art by Opus 5.5: https://tools.simonwillison.net/kakapo-party
And some Monkey Island style music (Opus can compose music too): https://tools.simonwillison.net/scrimshaw-jukebox
Anthropic's models do all of this by outputting code. GPT-6 Astra has similar capabilities - I got this Blender model using that: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blender-viewer?url=https%3A%...
Pardon, I have a lot of questions about that Scrimshaw music text format. It's clever. Did you invent it, and is it specifically intended to be written to by LLMs? Is the editor/player LLM-coded as well, and was this its recommendation for a format that would be easy for LLMs to write? I'm wondering why this instead of say, asking it to write a .MOD file.
Opus invented it, and wrote the player, and the songs.
My prompts were:
> I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the music and build an artifact that can play it out loud - include some example tracks in that artifact
> I am looking for music of the quality of the original secret of Monkey Island
And then later:
> Modify scrimshaw jukebox to add a copy-paste prompt that explains the music format, it should be shown at the bottom of the page below the readable instructions, the prompt should be designed to help any LLM tool compose music in the correct format. It should have a copy to clipboard button.
https://claude.ai/share/1f721c20-2499-4d23-b368-3ab57146d956 and then https://claude.ai/code/session_01R3xuRtjVHqHo1GNbget6Tu
This is great! Love the pixel art and tunes.
the "monkey island"-musc makes me so sad. why would anyone make an AI do this when it took such craft. i hope you all die :'(
That's a bit extreme.
I think the music from the original is art, and I have enormous respect for it - I can still hum some of those tunes out loud thirty years later.
The "music" in my demo helps show that text-based LLMs can do a passable job of composing simple 90s-era imitations of computer game music. That's interesting, because most people don't like not expect a text LLM to be able to do that.
They are really good at generating artifacts, which are windows within the replies containing all kind of visualization, often interactive.
They are still not great at SVG. I just asked Opus and Fable to add a background to an SVG and the results were, well, not great.
SVG is hard.
Tried it with GPT-6 Astra with Ultra but the outcome was underwhelming with Blender. Maybe it was my prompting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯