Two years of computers drawing unicorns

Every day, for over 700 days, GPT has drawn a unicorn. From scribbles and circles to real artwork, this is its journey so far.

Back in April 2023 I wrote an article about a new experiment: GPT Unicorn. The premise was pretty simple: I'd ask OpenAI's GPT model to draw a unicorn once a day, and give me the SVG. No self-improvement, no GAN, just one chance per day to draw an SVG unicorn.

Some of the comments at the time questioned why I'd bother, that nothing would change in a model day to day, but none of that mattered because I span it up and promptly forgot about it.

But while I'm sat here, waiting for Claude to finish doing whatever it's doing, I thought I'd have a look at some of the pictures. Noticing it running gpt-4o still, I decided to update it to gpt-4.1 and then, I supposed, I'd do a few stats and post a blog post.

Want to see the whole thing first? GPT Unicorn.

Let's go.

Stats

(Thanks ChatGPT!)

Starting with gpt-4-0314 we had 66 unicorns. OpenAI must then have updated their pointer to gpt-4-0613 where we had an impressive 312 unicorns, before I intervened to move from gpt-4 to gpt-4o in May 2024.

We had 142 unicorns from gpt-4o-2024-05-13 until we reached gpt-4o-2024-08-06 which gave us 237. That brings us to today, where I've intervened to move to gpt-4.1.

Looking back

The early days of gpt-4-0314 had some confused outputs. The formative years were a mix of abstract clutter, sad faces, and almost unicorns.

There was one notable contender, and, some horrifying creations.

Overall, it wasn't very good at drawing. Then we moved onto gpt-4-0613. We started to see an evolution of ability. Faces, eyes, horns. We're not there yet but we're on the way.

It wasn't all perfect, still producing lots of failed images, confusions, and a few funny contraptions, but among the hundreds produced, there were a few that could be considered unicorn-like:

In a strange way, looking at these, I feel a little bit proud. Let's not unpack that. We then moved onto gpt-4o-2024-05-13 of which there were just 142 days of drawing. With this model we begin to see far fewer "broken" images, though they still exist.

What we did see was a lot more unicorn-like drawings.

Finally, we moved onto gpt-4o-2024-08-06, which gave us a mixed bag of unicorns. There were a few patterns noticeable among them, including, the side-eye.

But as you can see from the full list of images, there are still many failed attempts at drawing. Let's see how gpt-4.1 does now it carries the flame.

The Prompt

Over the whole course of 757 days of drawing (816 days ago -- there was some downtime before I revived the project) the prompt has not changed.

System: You are a helpful assistant that generates SVG drawings. You respond only with SVG. You do not respond with text.

User: Draw a unicorn in SVG format. Dimensions: 500x500. Respond ONLY with a single SVG string. Do not respond with conversation or codeblocks.

It could be better. We could help them more. But if you asked someone to draw a unicorn, that's all they would need. So, that's all they'll get.

See you in another two years.

P.S. I wrote this blog post by hand. Can you believe it?

Update: GPT-4.1

I checked back today and gpt-4.1 has drawn a perfect unicorn. Perfect in the sense that it's instantly identifiable compared with what we saw two years ago.