Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas

(stillwet.art)

80 points | by alstonite 17 hours ago

11 comments

  • dangoodmanUT 1 minute ago
    This is such a good idea. Idk how to make this a benchmark, but it should be (maybe elo?).

    Should be a Twtich stream tbh

  • moojacob 18 minutes ago
    It’s interesting how diffusion models are getting bitter lessened by LLMs. I suspect anthropic has tens of thousands of RL environments recreating famous paintings with code because it was anthropic employees who first started posting about these capabilities on X.

    Opus is also getting decent pixel art. I have ran some experiments with Opus 5.5 to turn 90s pinball displays (black and white pixel art) into double resolution colored remastered pixels.

    https://files.catbox.moe/tbx2u7.png

    I prompted it a lot but didn’t draw any pixels. Seems to be bad at hands still. I think a skilled pixel artist could greatly speed up their work with Claude code.

    It also makes me sad for artists. They didn’t get paid much anyway. Art should be something human to human like writing text. Although, most large commercial art products (marvel movies) already lack any human to human connection you see in paintings or indie games. The large commercial art products will be 50% AI soon.

  • cronin101 4 hours ago
    This is simultaneously incredibly impressive and annoyingly uncanny valley, since most of the landscapes are "ruined" by a cluster of churches right next to each other that is completely nonsensical.
  • albert_e 11 hours ago
    This is in the same space as this creative exploration posted a few months ago -

    ---

    Training AI to Paint with Code, March 2026

    https://surya.website/rling-qwen-to-paint-with-code

    HN Discussion:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411800

    Thesis presentation:

    https://vimeo.com/1190839818

    And I believe the HN user who created this is @kickingkeys

    ---

    fascinating space to explore:

    Instead of having AI directly generate an output, what happens if we ask AI to take a stab at the PROCESS of creating something.

  • threethirtytwo 8 minutes ago
    I find it unlikely that there's any direct training data for this. I'm talking about direct training data for using brush strokes like humans to construct an image.

    Correct me if I'm wrong but this capability is emergent, and very very compelling evidence that LLMs are actually intelligent.

  • davidcollantes 5 hours ago
    I love the canvases, and truly would like to have a bit more inside on the process this specific author used to reach the results shown. I have read Surya's "Training AI to Paint with Code" but, what's Alice's technique?
  • BobbyTables2 15 hours ago
    I’m a bit behind the times…

    How does Opus actually paint? Thought it only generated text…

    • vunderba 9 minutes ago
      Think of it like the old turtle graphics feature in the LOGO programming language.

      You give an LLM a virtual canvas and a set of “instructions” to control the pen.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics

    • llagerlof 13 hours ago
      It generate commands and coordinates to move the mouse and use the paint tools.
  • mhw11 7 hours ago
    What capability makes this possible? It’s incredible! Does it have an image-generation model?
    • voxic11 2 hours ago
      No this is just it moving the mouse and viewing the results with it's vision capabilities.
  • mannanj 51 minutes ago
    I don’t like how it’s a human aiming to portray the ai generation with their taste and judgements about it but then becoming lazy and quitting on that and leaving in the ai generated portrayal about its own judgment in the site.

    Just share your opinions, dude, we get its ai generated but share your own taste. We want to know what YOU think. Stop being shy and lazy.

  • londons_explore 10 hours ago
    Now combine this with a robot able to move a paint brush and mix on a palette, and you could make some pretty awesome real-paint artwork
    • chasd00 8 minutes ago
      Would be a good project for an afterschool club. Even using a multi color pen plotter + webcam would be pretty neat.
    • albert_e 8 hours ago
      Bob ROS
      • Koala_ice 1 hour ago
        This is an S-tier comment. Thank you for your service.
  • no_multitudes 17 minutes ago
    What a misanthropic thing to make. I'm embarrassed for you.