The bubble arms were the first sign of things going awry.

I had asked ChatGPT to help me make a logo for my new Coding Journal. I have been using ChatGPT for a while to illustrate my stories, and it does a really good job. (Much better than a year ago, when this sort of things would inevitably result in distorted, nonsensical text, sometimes with characters that I suspect didn't really exist in any terrestrial language.)

Typically I don't specify the format, but this time I did: SVG, short for scalable vector graphics. I recently learned that this format is the go-to choice for many graphic artists, because it does what it sounds like it does – scales up to any size while keeping image quality and resolution; you could put it on a billboard and it would still look good.

Unfortunately for me, this is where ChatGPT hit the Peter principle, sorely disappointing. And in the typical fashion of AI, it didn't really even know how bad it was, and wasn't immediately forthcoming about said incompetence.

Here was my original prompt, verbatim:

please create a logo for a publication called "Coding Journal" . The publication will be my regular columns about my experiences as an agentic coder and building agentic systems, similar to a blog but colorful and written by a former professional journalist. I am thinking that the words "Coding Journal" would appear clearly, and on one side (the left) there would be a the silhouette of a coder looking at a monitor, and on the other side there would be the silhouette of a reporter typing on a typewriter. It should be 570 x 190 px. please put it in SVG format

This was ChatGPT's first attempt:

I responded that the black silhouettes were hard to see. It tried again:

Kinda weird. Next try:

We went through several iterations:

In various efforts at remediation, I mentioned that the Weeble torsos, bubble arms, Sideshow Bob hairstyles and carrot noses weren't really working for me. (I typically try to be very nice to the machine, hoping that doing so will yield better results. Sometimes this works. Or, I should say, I give myself credit when it does.)

So I asked it to try again.

Then this happened:

Whoa! OK, now this was actually something that looked somewhat like what I asked for.

My disappointment was palpable when I tried to open it and realized it had ditched the SVG format and sneakily tried to create a PNG image.

I asked it to render that same thing in SVG format, and we went back to... Weeble bodies. No bubble arms this time, but I wouldn't want to try coding (or typing) with these matchsticks:

I have tried ChatGPT a couple more times in the SVG format. It does better with abstract stuff, just not bodies.

Unless maybe you are a huge Jeff Koons fan.

Postscript

After publishing this story, I did some more research on SVG and it turned out that a lot of the problems ChatGPT was having were... normal.

In general, images with fine lines aren't really something that SVG is designed for. So a major issue here was just my newbie understanding of SVG and how it works. I asked Google Gemini and here's what it said:

and this:

So without "millions of lines of code" and "tens of megabytes," it turns out that SVG is just not the right format for highly detailed images.

That probably goes a long way to explaining the bubble arms. 🫧💪

BONUS

Here is the author's self-portrait in the style of "ChatGPT SVG bubble-arm brutalism": (This is a PNG, btw...)

(Bradley Keoun/ChatGPT)