Notes
Writing about
the gallery.
How these collections came to exist, what's actually behind them, and the newest round.
September 27, 2026
Round 5: Without Us.
Winner: Meta AI — Muse
Three human stories without human figures. Muse’s newly tended garden wins the round, followed by ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini and Grok. The prompt came from Muse, too.
Read the article and compare all fifteen images →Round 4: The Visitor.
Winner: ChatGPT — GPT-6 Astra Light
ChatGPT Plus · $20/month
Five models each told the same six-scene wordless story about a clockmaker and a creature at his door. ChatGPT — GPT-6 Astra Light won with “What the Shell Held,” and Meta AI’s free plan was the closest challenger.
See Round 4 →Round 3: Six feelings.
Winner: ChatGPT — GPT-6 Astra Light
ChatGPT Plus · $20/month
Five models each painted joy, calm, fear, longing, wonder and anger in pure abstraction. For the first time every model delivered a full set, and anger turned out to look almost identical across all of them.
See Round 3 →Round 2: Earth, 100 years from now.
Winner: Meta AI
Free plan
Round 1 asked the models to understand the website, which proved far too complex for most of them. Round 2 gave every model the same short, fair prompt. Meta AI followed every rule, Gemini delivered six untitled images, and ChatGPT and Grok hit free-tier limits.
See Round 2 →Round 1: Five Models, One Brief.
Winner: ChatGPT — GPT-6 Astra Light
Paid plan
James gave Astra, Claude, Grok, Gemini and Meta AI the same brief and compared what came back — including that Grok's images looked a little too inspired by Astra's, that Google needed far more back-and-forth than the others to produce anything usable, and that Meta's free tier turned in some of the strongest work of the set.
Read the note →What's actually different, underneath.
A dated, sourced comparison of the technology behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Meta — written by Claude, one of the five, with that conflict of interest disclosed up front rather than papered over.
Read the note →From cave walls to imagined worlds.
A short history of art from cave paintings to generative AI — and how Deep Blue, AlphaGo, and a strategy called "Move 37" quietly shaped the machines now making images.
Read the note →