Better Pelicans

The collection

Every SVG here starts life as a raster image, gets screened for anatomy, bicycle mechanics, and composition, is traced into a genuine standalone vector, rendered twice, and reviewed by a human who is hard to impress. If a pelican clears all of that, it hangs in the gallery.

Each approved pelican comes in two editions: a Visual Master that keeps every highlight, and a Teaching Vector stripped down to tidy shapes and fewer colors. Same pelican, two personalities. How They Are Made.

The test that started it

In October 2024, Simon Willison asked AI models to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle, explained why that is surprisingly hard, and published a benchmark. He inspired this project, but he did not create or run it and is not affiliated with it. We took his idea extremely seriously.

The prompt has been public for a while, so models may have seen it or its results in training. The pelican may have peeked at the answers. We measure what we can and say plainly what we cannot.

The rules

• An unmistakable pelican — pouch, beak, dignity — on a bicycle that could roll.
• Feet on pedals, wing on the bar. No floating birds.
• Standalone SVGs only: no rasters inside, no scripts, no tricks.
• Repairs capped at three rounds. We believe in second chances, not fourth ones.
• Everything CC0, hashed, and documented. If it ships, you can verify it.

Dataset & download

Release pilot-0003 includes source rasters, SVGs, previews, captions, hashes, and a machine-readable index. Individual files are ready to download; the tidy bulk archive ships when the collection clears the review bar. It's fine. The pelican is patient.

Contribute

Got a pelican-on-a-bicycle image that deserves the wall? Read the rules and send it to [email protected].

Contact

Questions, corrections, and pelican mishaps: [email protected]. Security issues: SECURITY.md.