3 ms·

Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition (side-view, 2d, biking right, flat ground beneath, etc)? I don't see any of that detai

Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition (side-view, 2d, biking right, flat ground beneath, etc)? I don't see any of that detailed in the prompt, yet they all seem to generate roughly the same image of differing quality.

simonw 1mo ago
It's really interesting, isn't it? They almost always cycle from left to right - but I have had a few which cycle in the other direction. The 2D / flat ground feels reasonable for a SVG, which implies a vector illustration.
- piker 1mo ago
  I was going to ask the exact same question earlier but deleted it after thinking “I’m sure Simon has done some sort of discussion on this.” Since it does seem novel to you, too, it would be really interesting to read more about this phenomenon.
- m12k 1mo ago
  It's my impression that it's common in western culture, where text is read left to right, and timelines are visualized as going from left to right, to also animate things going from left to right, since westerners thus have an instinct that "right = forward", so it "feels right" (familiar). I wonder to which degree this is reflected in the training data? And if you'd be more likely to get left-facing pelicans if you prompted it in Hebrew, Arabic or another right-to-left language?
  - jermaustin1 1mo ago
    Years ago, I lived in NYC, and my roommate was a director of photography for National Geographic, and various other nature documentaries. I loved photography (still do, but much less time for it as a late 30s adult than a mid 20s adult), and she was kind enough to answer any question I had regarding film/photo. She told me that "left to right" denoted progression in the story, "right to left" told the viewer the subject was "exiting" the current scene. She didn't go into the details of WHY, and I probably didn't probe deeper, but it stuck with me, and I notice it all the time in film and television.
    - necovek 1mo ago
      As a counterpoint, I did a quick image search on Kagi with "person on a bicycle", and I ended up with 12-left-pointed bicycles, only 3-right-pointed bicycles, 3 facing the camera, and 1 facing away from the camera — looking at photos above the fold (first screen). Even looking below, the pattern seems to continue, though not as prominently (I'd say 3:2 in favour of left-pointing bikes). Obviously, not scientific. All the left-pointing bicycles did not look weird to me either.
  - pixl97 1mo ago
    Forced side scrolling video games also almost always moved from left to right.
- johntb86 1mo ago
  Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.
- Melatonic 1mo ago
  It's the hero's journey. Home is always on the left and you leave going right. Standard in Animation I believe The real question should be: where are all your Pelicans going ?
- williamdclt 1mo ago
  > They almost always cycle from left to right Try searching "bike" in google image :) Most bike images are from the right side, as that's where the mechanism is (gears, chain etc), so not surprising that LLMs reproduce this
  - necovek 1mo ago
    I just did a similar test with Kagi image search using "person on a bicycle", and this actually favours left-pointing bikes (12 left to 3 right to 4 front/back). Maybe so the mechanism does not overwhelm the person? A search for "bicycle" actually matches your experience with 12 being to the right and 3 being to the left.
vunderba 1mo ago
The more generic your prompt, the more generic the response. It's a regression to the "mean" of the training data aka GIGO for AI. It's like when you ask your average person off the street to draw a house - it'll almost always be square with a triangle roof, one door, and two windows. In the pelican/bike example, it's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating snowball too. If the earliest examples were bike left-to-right, flat ground, etc. then they are also being scraped up in future LLMs.
- polyterative 1mo ago
  as a kid I did them like this. nobody told me to do that. are we all so similar?
  - srcreigh 1mo ago
    The adults brainwashed us https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/
  - collabs 1mo ago
    I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life. There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me. A medium blog post says > Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
    - ACCount37 1mo ago
      Westworld is such a time capsule. It's not even that old - but back when it was aired, an AI that can not just string together coherent sentences, but produce coherent reactions in novel, fully unintended contexts, like Maeve was doing there? It was totally a sci-fi premise. Now we have AIs capable of that and more, and no one bats an eye.
postalcoder 1mo ago
Search Google Images for "bicycle". Almost all bicycle product shots are staged the same way: side view, going left-to-right. It makes sense to me that given that skew in the training data, the model grounds itself in the bicycle.
- daemonologist 1mo ago
  and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike - if you want to inspect or admire a bicycle you look at the right side, as you might look under the hood of a car. (Why the drivetrain is on the right, I don't know. But most bike parts follow open standards so it's quite entrenched.)
  - georgemcbay 1mo ago
    > and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike While I'm sure this factors into things for advertisements for bike components, there is also just a general preference that westerners have for left-to-right motion. Not just in bike ads, but all ads with (or suggesting) movement. And also not just ads, but movies where directors believe left-to-right motion is associated with progression and right-to-left motion is regressive.
    - allendoerfer 1mo ago
      Research has shown that people like to walk counterclockwise (right to left) through supermarkets, which is why they are arranged like this for maximum profit.
      - HarHarVeryFunny 1mo ago
        Interesting that such a preference exists, and makes sense that supermarkets would therefore be arranged to support this, although as far as I can see this is only to extent of entrance doors typically being "off center" and starting you off to the right. The organization of the store - where the various produce/bakery/deli/frozen-food etc aisles/sections are located seems random from store to store. It would be interesting to know how people behave if the entrance is to the left vs right. Would they change the direction they walked though the store, or would they just lose customers due to this "awkward" layout?
ModernMech 1mo ago
Yes, I do a thing where I ask the machine to generate responses in the form of a lizard talking to a cat. The lizard is always a green gecko and the cat is always orange, which I never specify.
optimalsolver 1mo ago
Sun is missing a few rays and not wearing sunglasses.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
reaperducer 1mo ago
Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition Because they're computers. They don't have an imagination and the ability to create things from whole cloth the way humans do. Much like a mother pelican, they regurgitate what they've been fed.
BeetleB 1mo ago
Not when rendered via POV-Ray: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-rayt... I plan to update it with more pelicans from all the models released since. (Spoiler alert: They haven't improved much since then).
- xhrpost 1mo ago
  Wow, I actually had this exact idea. I was specifically curious as to how well a given LLM could understand a DSL that hasn't changed much in a couple decades and doesn't have nearly as many examples to learn from online. Seems like it did alright, all things considered.
  - necovek 1mo ago
    I've done a similar thing with asking a few LLMs to do it using PostScript: in my view, a couple generations behind compared to doing it in SVG. https://danilo.segan.org/blog/llm/postscript-pelicans-on-bicycles https://danilo.segan.org/blog/llm/postscript-pelicans-on-bic...
- murkt 1mo ago
  Ohh, horizontal wheels. They’re about as good as I expected, models have pretty bad spatial awareness. I would expect Fable to be a bit better than old models, though.
- fc417fc802 1mo ago
  I wonder how a multi-modal model would do with a harness and tool calling? Specifically a "render" command that produced an image output enabling it to iterate. (Well I see you did this manually with gemini 2.5 pro but I still think it would be interesting to explore various harness setups.) > GPT-5.1 Codex > monstrosity What are you talking about? That's clearly a sci-fi pelican on a hoverboard (successor of the humble bicycle) wearing a visor. Truly visionary.
porphyra 1mo ago
The canonical view of a bicycle is facing right. Usually, people want to draw/photograph/depict the side of the bicycle with the running gear, which is on the right side of the frame for historical reasons.
__MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
The thing that distinguishes pelicans from other birds does so most strongly in profile. If you're looking straight at one, the throat pouch would be hidden by the beak. I bet if it instead had something to do with black widow spiders we'd find that we're most often looking at the bottom of the spider's abdomen, regardless of whatever non-spider-like activity is supplied.
SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago
I’m a firm believer in pelicanmaxxing. They’re all so close in proportions.
elfly 1mo ago
well it is svg, it is doing it from circles and lines as primitives, it wants to do it simply and kind of builds the whole thing hierarchically. Making it 3d is way more complicated (as the POV example shows) and the prompt doesn't say 3d anyway
bodeadly 1mo ago
Yes. It's because you are asking it to generate an image of a pelican riding a bicycle. If someone asked you to draw a pelican riding a bycycle, would you interpret that to mean using 3d photorealism? LLMs follow conventions. The convention for an animal riding a bike is to create a childish 2d line drawing.
OliverGuy 1mo ago
If you look at bike product photography it's always drive side facing the camera, which means front wheel on the right. If I had to guess this is probably where this comes from Don't know if that's ever possible to know though unless you train a model from scratch but remove all bike product photography and adjacent materials from the training data?
marsx-dev 1mo ago
I wonder if this is partly because “pelican riding a bicycle” has become a kind of benchmark prompt by now. If so, could the models actually be getting better at the benchmark rather than getting better at following the prompt?
torginus 1mo ago
Yeah, why are they always going to the right?
cgio 1mo ago
I don’t think it’s because of the pelican but rather because of the bike. Edit:fixed autocorrect typo

simonw 1mo ago

It's really interesting, isn't it? They almost always cycle from left to right - but I have had a few which cycle in the other direction. The 2D / flat ground feels reasonable for a SVG, which implies a vector illustration.

piker 1mo ago
I was going to ask the exact same question earlier but deleted it after thinking “I’m sure Simon has done some sort of discussion on this.” Since it does seem novel to you, too, it would be really interesting to read more about this phenomenon.
m12k 1mo ago
It's my impression that it's common in western culture, where text is read left to right, and timelines are visualized as going from left to right, to also animate things going from left to right, since westerners thus have an instinct that "right = forward", so it "feels right" (familiar). I wonder to which degree this is reflected in the training data? And if you'd be more likely to get left-facing pelicans if you prompted it in Hebrew, Arabic or another right-to-left language?
- jermaustin1 1mo ago
  Years ago, I lived in NYC, and my roommate was a director of photography for National Geographic, and various other nature documentaries. I loved photography (still do, but much less time for it as a late 30s adult than a mid 20s adult), and she was kind enough to answer any question I had regarding film/photo. She told me that "left to right" denoted progression in the story, "right to left" told the viewer the subject was "exiting" the current scene. She didn't go into the details of WHY, and I probably didn't probe deeper, but it stuck with me, and I notice it all the time in film and television.
  - necovek 1mo ago
    As a counterpoint, I did a quick image search on Kagi with "person on a bicycle", and I ended up with 12-left-pointed bicycles, only 3-right-pointed bicycles, 3 facing the camera, and 1 facing away from the camera — looking at photos above the fold (first screen). Even looking below, the pattern seems to continue, though not as prominently (I'd say 3:2 in favour of left-pointing bikes). Obviously, not scientific. All the left-pointing bicycles did not look weird to me either.
- pixl97 1mo ago
  Forced side scrolling video games also almost always moved from left to right.
johntb86 1mo ago
Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.
Melatonic 1mo ago
It's the hero's journey. Home is always on the left and you leave going right. Standard in Animation I believe The real question should be: where are all your Pelicans going ?
williamdclt 1mo ago
> They almost always cycle from left to right Try searching "bike" in google image :) Most bike images are from the right side, as that's where the mechanism is (gears, chain etc), so not surprising that LLMs reproduce this
- necovek 1mo ago
  I just did a similar test with Kagi image search using "person on a bicycle", and this actually favours left-pointing bikes (12 left to 3 right to 4 front/back). Maybe so the mechanism does not overwhelm the person? A search for "bicycle" actually matches your experience with 12 being to the right and 3 being to the left.

vunderba 1mo ago

The more generic your prompt, the more generic the response. It's a regression to the "mean" of the training data aka GIGO for AI. It's like when you ask your average person off the street to draw a house - it'll almost always be square with a triangle roof, one door, and two windows. In the pelican/bike example, it's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating snowball too. If the earliest examples were bike left-to-right, flat ground, etc. then they are also being scraped up in future LLMs.

polyterative 1mo ago
as a kid I did them like this. nobody told me to do that. are we all so similar?
- srcreigh 1mo ago
  The adults brainwashed us https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/barndroem-box-beige-70560615/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/ https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/vallaby-rug-green-10548216/
- collabs 1mo ago
  I sincerely believe I've never had a single original thought™ in my whole life. There is this scene in the HBO series Westworld where a "host" says some words in sequence which is shown on a display as she says it. Of course, even me thinking of this scene and connecting it to your comment was not original, someone else clearly had the same programming as me. A medium blog post says > Pair what with me?” — the moment Maeve (a humanoid android) uttered those words in Westworld (Season 1, Episode 6: “The Adversary”), something clicked. Not for the average viewer, but for me, a STEM educator and AI enthusiast who, just weeks earlier, had read Stephen Wolfram’s seminal essay, What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
  - ACCount37 1mo ago
    Westworld is such a time capsule. It's not even that old - but back when it was aired, an AI that can not just string together coherent sentences, but produce coherent reactions in novel, fully unintended contexts, like Maeve was doing there? It was totally a sci-fi premise. Now we have AIs capable of that and more, and no one bats an eye.

postalcoder 1mo ago

Search Google Images for "bicycle". Almost all bicycle product shots are staged the same way: side view, going left-to-right. It makes sense to me that given that skew in the training data, the model grounds itself in the bicycle.

daemonologist 1mo ago
and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike - if you want to inspect or admire a bicycle you look at the right side, as you might look under the hood of a car. (Why the drivetrain is on the right, I don't know. But most bike parts follow open standards so it's quite entrenched.)
- georgemcbay 1mo ago
  > and furthermore, this is because the drivetrain is ~always on the right side of the bike While I'm sure this factors into things for advertisements for bike components, there is also just a general preference that westerners have for left-to-right motion. Not just in bike ads, but all ads with (or suggesting) movement. And also not just ads, but movies where directors believe left-to-right motion is associated with progression and right-to-left motion is regressive.
  - allendoerfer 1mo ago
    Research has shown that people like to walk counterclockwise (right to left) through supermarkets, which is why they are arranged like this for maximum profit.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 1mo ago
      Interesting that such a preference exists, and makes sense that supermarkets would therefore be arranged to support this, although as far as I can see this is only to extent of entrance doors typically being "off center" and starting you off to the right. The organization of the store - where the various produce/bakery/deli/frozen-food etc aisles/sections are located seems random from store to store. It would be interesting to know how people behave if the entrance is to the left vs right. Would they change the direction they walked though the store, or would they just lose customers due to this "awkward" layout?

ModernMech 1mo ago

Yes, I do a thing where I ask the machine to generate responses in the form of a lizard talking to a cat. The lizard is always a green gecko and the cat is always orange, which I never specify.

optimalsolver 1mo ago

Sun is missing a few rays and not wearing sunglasses.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

reaperducer 1mo ago

Is there a reason these pelicans always have roughly the same composition Because they're computers. They don't have an imagination and the ability to create things from whole cloth the way humans do. Much like a mother pelican, they regurgitate what they've been fed.

BeetleB 1mo ago

Not when rendered via POV-Ray: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-rayt... I plan to update it with more pelicans from all the models released since. (Spoiler alert: They haven't improved much since then).

xhrpost 1mo ago
Wow, I actually had this exact idea. I was specifically curious as to how well a given LLM could understand a DSL that hasn't changed much in a couple decades and doesn't have nearly as many examples to learn from online. Seems like it did alright, all things considered.
- necovek 1mo ago
  I've done a similar thing with asking a few LLMs to do it using PostScript: in my view, a couple generations behind compared to doing it in SVG. https://danilo.segan.org/blog/llm/postscript-pelicans-on-bicycles https://danilo.segan.org/blog/llm/postscript-pelicans-on-bic...
murkt 1mo ago
Ohh, horizontal wheels. They’re about as good as I expected, models have pretty bad spatial awareness. I would expect Fable to be a bit better than old models, though.
fc417fc802 1mo ago
I wonder how a multi-modal model would do with a harness and tool calling? Specifically a "render" command that produced an image output enabling it to iterate. (Well I see you did this manually with gemini 2.5 pro but I still think it would be interesting to explore various harness setups.) > GPT-5.1 Codex > monstrosity What are you talking about? That's clearly a sci-fi pelican on a hoverboard (successor of the humble bicycle) wearing a visor. Truly visionary.

porphyra 1mo ago

The canonical view of a bicycle is facing right. Usually, people want to draw/photograph/depict the side of the bicycle with the running gear, which is on the right side of the frame for historical reasons.

__MatrixMan__ 1mo ago

The thing that distinguishes pelicans from other birds does so most strongly in profile. If you're looking straight at one, the throat pouch would be hidden by the beak. I bet if it instead had something to do with black widow spiders we'd find that we're most often looking at the bottom of the spider's abdomen, regardless of whatever non-spider-like activity is supplied.

SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago

I’m a firm believer in pelicanmaxxing. They’re all so close in proportions.

elfly 1mo ago

well it is svg, it is doing it from circles and lines as primitives, it wants to do it simply and kind of builds the whole thing hierarchically. Making it 3d is way more complicated (as the POV example shows) and the prompt doesn't say 3d anyway

bodeadly 1mo ago

Yes. It's because you are asking it to generate an image of a pelican riding a bicycle. If someone asked you to draw a pelican riding a bycycle, would you interpret that to mean using 3d photorealism? LLMs follow conventions. The convention for an animal riding a bike is to create a childish 2d line drawing.

OliverGuy 1mo ago

If you look at bike product photography it's always drive side facing the camera, which means front wheel on the right. If I had to guess this is probably where this comes from Don't know if that's ever possible to know though unless you train a model from scratch but remove all bike product photography and adjacent materials from the training data?

marsx-dev 1mo ago

I wonder if this is partly because “pelican riding a bicycle” has become a kind of benchmark prompt by now. If so, could the models actually be getting better at the benchmark rather than getting better at following the prompt?

torginus 1mo ago

Yeah, why are they always going to the right?

cgio 1mo ago

I don’t think it’s because of the pelican but rather because of the bike. Edit:fixed autocorrect typo