Pelican-bicycle alternatives

Simon Willison tests language models by asking for an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle, but a well-known prompt can end up in training data. This gallery uses thirty new prompts of the same shape, a living thing doing something unlikely with a machine, such as a starfish driving a bulldozer or a penguin juggling chainsaws. Ten models answered them in autumn 2025, and a 2026 run through OpenRouter with high reasoning effort adds six current models, covering prompts 1 to 10 so far with the time and cost of each image. Images appear exactly as the models returned them, and files that are not well-formed XML are marked as not rendering. The site and the code that called the models were produced by Claude working as Claude Code, with Tom Gally writing the original prompts and paying for the API calls.