Why do LLM pelicans look like this?

When given the prompt Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.

Original SVGs from Simon Willison’s runs · highest reasoning setting that returned an SVG

This is the LLM diversity collapse problem no one is talking about.

PS: We benchmarked this diversity collapse in UI design as part of our research on LLM creativity .

⚠️ Frontier AI models still fall significantly short of human designers on design creativity. ⚠️

Introducing Design Creativity Bench, a new benchmark evaluating AI models’ creativity on UI design tasks.

⚠️ Frontier AI models still fall significantly short of human designers on design creativity. ⚠️

Introducing Design Creativity Bench, a new benchmark evaluating AI models’ creativity on UI design tasks.

Despite rapid advances in their ability to generate functional websites and product UIs, leading AI models still struggle to make creative design decisions.

We evaluated 16 frontier models across 80 open-ended UI tasks, each adapted to two distinct product domains alongside human designer references.

Existing UI benchmarks often measure a single output quality metric. Instead, we measure three dimensions of design creativity:

The results reveal a substantial gap in overall creativity: The best model, @OpenAI GPT-6 Astra, scores 65.5 against a human reference of 92.3.

We're publishing the full leaderboard, methodology, and reproducible evaluation framework to make design creativity a measurable dimension of frontier model capability.

I'm a human, an engineer, and an aspiring new-age rationalist.