These types of tests are fundamentally flawed. I was able to create perfect clock using gemini 2.5 pro - https://gemini.google.com/share/136f07a0fa78
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AI World Clocks
61–70 of 404 posts
Re: AI World Clocks
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience they quickly fail to understand anything beyond a superficial description of the image you want.
That's less and less true https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/
Related ongoing thread:
Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI image generation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917875 - Nov 2025 (214 comments)
Re: AI World Clocks
#63Since the first (good) image generation models became available, I've been trying to get them to generate an image of a clock with 13 instead of the usual 12 hour divisions. I have not been successful. Usually they will just replace the "12" with a "13" and/or mess up the clock face in some other way. I'd be interested if anyone else is successful. Share how you did it!
This is really cool. I tried to prompt gemini but every time I got the same picture. I do not know how to share a session (like it is possible with Chatgpt) but the prompts were
If a clock had 13 hours, what would be the angle between two of these 13 hours?
Generate an image of such a clock
No, I want the clock to have 13 distinct hours, with the angle between them as you calculated above
This is the same image. There need to be 13 hour marks around the dial, evenly spaced
... And its last answer was
You are absolutely right, my apologies. It seems I made an error and generated the same image again. I will correct that immediately.
Here is an image of a clock face with 13 distinct hour marks, evenly spaced around the dial, reflecting the angle we calculated.
And the very same clock, with 12 hours, and a 13th above the 12...
Re: AI World Clocks
#64Cool, and marginally informative on the current state of things. but kind of a waste of energy given everything is re-done every minute to compare. We'd probably only need a handful of each to see the meaningful differences.
It's actually quite fascinating if you watch it for 5 minutes. Some models are overall bad, but others nail it in one minute and butcher it in the next. It's perhaps the best example I have seen of model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt.
It is really interesting to watch them for a while. QWEN keeps outputting some really abstract interpretations of a clock, KIMI is consistently very good, GPT5's results line up exactly with my experience with its code output (overly complex and never working correctly)
Re: AI World Clocks
#65Limiting the model to only use 2000 tokens while also asking it to output ONLY HTML/CSS is just stupid. It's like asking a programmer to perform the same task while removing half their brain and also forget about their programming experience. This is a stupid and meaningless benchmark.
Re: AI World Clocks
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The energy usage is minuscule.
It's wasteful. If someone built a clock out of 47 microservices that called out to 193 APIs to check the current time, location, time zone, and preferred display format we'd rightfully criticize it for similar reasons. In a world where Javascript and Electron are still getting (again, rightfully) skewered for inefficiency despite often exceeding the performance of many compiled languages, we should not dismiss the di…
Let's do some math.
60x24x30 = 40k AI calls per month per model. Let's suppose there are 1000 output tokens (might it be 10k tokens? Seems like a lot for this task). So 40m tokens per model.
The price for 1m output tokens[0] ranges from $.10 (qwen-2.5) to $60 (GPT-4). So $4/mo for the cheapest, and $2.5k/mo for the most expensive.
So this might cost several thousand dollars a month? Something smells funny. But you're right, throttling it to once an hour would achieve a similar goal and likely cost less than $100/mo (which is still more than I would spend on a project like this).
Re: AI World Clocks
#67Re: AI World Clocks
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because, LLMs are touted to be the silver bullet of silver bullets. Built upon world's knowledge, and with the capacity to call upon updated information with agents, they are ought to rival the top programmers 3 days ago.
They might be touted like that but it seems like you don't understand how they work. The example in the article shows that the prompt is limiting the LLM by giving it access to only 2000 tokens and also saying "ONLY OUTPUT ...". This is like me asking you to solve the same problem but forcing you do de-activate half of your brain + forget any programming experience you have. It's just stupid.
> like you don't understand how they work.
I would not make such assumptions.
> The example in the article shows that the prompt is limiting the LLM by giving it access to only 2000 tokens and also saying "ONLY OUTPUT ..."
The site is pretty simple, method is pretty straightforward. If you believe this is unfair, you can always build one yourself.
> It's just stupid.
No, it's a great way of testing things within constraints.
Re: AI World Clocks
#69Since the first (good) image generation models became available, I've been trying to get them to generate an image of a clock with 13 instead of the usual 12 hour divisions. I have not been successful. Usually they will just replace the "12" with a "13" and/or mess up the clock face in some other way. I'd be interested if anyone else is successful. Share how you did it!
LLMs are terrible for out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. You should use chain of thought suppression and give constaints explictly. My prompt to Grok: --- Follow these rules exactly: - There are 13 hours, labeled 1–13. - There are 13 ticks. - The center of each number is at angle: index * (360/13) - Do not infer anything else. - Do not apply knowledge of normal clocks. Use the following variables: HOUR_COUNT = 13 ANGLE…
Well, that's cheating :) You asked it to generate code, which is ok because it does not represent a direct generated image of a clock.
Can grok generate images? What would the result be?
I will try your prompt on chatgpt and gemini