The Emperor Pelican Has No Clothes

October 14, 2026

Why do all LLM pelicans look like this?

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

Thirteen pelicans riding bicycles from recent LLMs, with each model labelled

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

When they could look like these?

Twelve diverse pelicans riding bicycles: a royal parade, monsoon, polar night, alpine race, desert, fog, neon alley, wedding, market, Victorian promenade, storm and Moon

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 .

Design Creativity BenchCreativity score
—Human reference92.3
01GPT-6 Astra65.5
02GPT-6.1 Sol63.7
03Grok 4.762.2
04Gemini 3.8 Flash60.6
View the full leaderboard↗

⚠️ 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:

  • – Originality: How distinct a model's designs are from other models' outputs for the same brief.
  • – Creative Range: How much a model adapts its design decisions when the product domain changes.
  • – Appropriateness: How well the generated UI satisfies the functional requirements of the brief.

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.

📊 Benchmark Leaderboard: https://kombai.com/benchmark/
📄 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11539
🤗 HuggingFace Datasets: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Kombai/design-creativity-bench
🔗 Github: https://github.com/kombai-io/design-creativity-bench/
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Aman Rusia

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