Can AI create pelican SVGs?
Yes, and the good ones are not written by a language model. Ask an image model to draw the pelican, then convert the picture to SVG with SVG.new. Asking a model to write the SVG code itself, as in Simon Willison's famous test, gets you something stiffer. Here is the best of four hand-written attempts next to one picture we traced.
What the pelican test measures
In October 2024 Simon Willison started giving every new language model the same job: Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. He picked a subject nobody had drawn in SVG before:
“I'm pretty sure there aren't any pelican on a bicycle SVG files floating around (yet) that might have already been sucked into the training data.”
The model never sees what it draws. It writes coordinates for every wheel, beak and foot and hopes they line up. That makes it a good test of reasoning about space, and it is why the pelicans look the way they do. His pelican tag has about 150 posts. We ran his exact prompt once on four current models on 16 October 2026, with default settings, and kept the first answer.
Gemini 4 Argon
gemini-4-argon, one API call. Open the SVG
The best of the four. It has a chain, mudguards, a scarf and a sailor cap, and the wings grip the bars. The pouch still hangs off the face like an orange sack, and the legs are two orange tubes.
GPT-6.1 Sol
gpt-6.1-sol, one API call. Open the SVG
A tidy bird on a tidy bike. Its wings stay folded at its sides, so nobody is holding the handlebars.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
claude-sonnet-5-5, one API call. Open the SVG
A decent pouch and a real chainring. The legs fold at angles no bird could manage, and the wing lies across the handlebars, so how it steers is anyone’s guess.
Claude Opus 5.5
claude-opus-5-5, written in the Claude Code session that built this page. Open the SVG
Our own attempt, and the weakest. The bird hovers over the bike with no saddle, the neck is one bent line and a foot misses its pedal.
Draw it first, then trace it
We asked gemini-3.1-flash-image for “A pelican riding a bicycle. Flat illustration on a plain white background.” and dropped its first picture on the SVG.new converter. The pelican kept its cap, its scarf and the fish in the basket, and every spoke became a path you can select and change.
The same route works in any style
All four hand-written pelicans came out as the same kind of flat cartoon. A picture can be anything, so we gave the image model the same pelican with a different style each time and converted each picture once.
Sticker
“Die-cut sticker: bold flat colors, thick dark outline and a white sticker border.” Picture · SVG
Outlines, flat colors and the white border came through clean. The paper behind it turned into a few soft gray shapes.
Ink line drawing
“Single-color black ink line drawing, clean even lines, no shading or fill.” Picture · SVG
Black lines on white trace cleanly. Every line made it, down to the hatching on the pouch. This is the one to send to a cutting machine or a laser engraver.
Watercolor
“Soft watercolor painting with gentle color washes and blended gradients.” Picture · SVG
The washes became soft patches of color with gradients between them. It still reads as a painting; the paper grain is gone.
Screen print
“Retro screen print illustration in three flat ink colors on a cream background.” Picture · SVG
We asked for three inks and got about nine. Flat ink and bold outlines trace almost exactly, and some of the ink speckle survived as tiny dots. The first attempt came back as two posters side by side with made-up slogans, so we asked again for one image with no text.
Pixel art
“Pixel art, 64 by 64 pixel sprite scaled up with hard square pixels, limited palette.” Picture · SVG
The pixels stayed square. Up close a few edges carry a thin sliver of a neighboring color.
Geometric
“Flat geometric vector illustration built from simple circles, triangles and arcs, limited palette.” Picture · SVG
Shapes this simple are what tracing handles best. The circles, arcs and every spoke came through crisp; the faint print texture in the picture is gone.
Zoom in and the edges stay sharp
Some online converters only wrap the original picture in an SVG file. A traced SVG is made of curves, so it stays sharp at any size. This is the pelican's eye, twelve times larger.
The traced file is an ordinary SVG. It opens in the SVG.new editor, Figma, Illustrator or Inkscape like any other, and you can select a single spoke and change its color. Try it with your own picture.
Not just pelicans
The same workflow makes logos, illustrations, stickers and cut files: get a picture you like, from an image model, a sketch or a photo, and convert it. The examples gallery shows more conversions up close. Photographs are the weak spot: up close they turn into flat bands of color.
Asking a model for the code is still quicker for a simple icon or diagram, or for a small file you want to edit by hand.
Coding agents tend to hand-write SVG when you ask for a graphic. Give yours the SVG.new MCP server and it can have an image made and convert it instead. There is also a Claude Code skill and an MCP setup guide for other agents.
claude mcp add svg-new \
-e SVG_NEW_API_KEY=svk_your_key_here \
-- npx -y @svgnew/mcpMore pelicans
- Pelicans on a bicycle
Simon Willison, October 2024
The first post, with 16 models and the script he ran.
- The pelican-riding-a-bicycle tag
Simon Willison
Every pelican since, usually posted the day a model comes out.
- simonw/pelican-bicycle
GitHub
The repository behind the first round.
- Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
Dylan Castillo, July 2026
Eight animals on six vehicles across seven models, checking whether labs train for the test. They don’t seem to.
To run the test yourself, install Simon Willison's llm tool and try llm "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle".
Common questions
Can AI create SVG files?
Yes, two ways. A language model can write SVG code from a prompt, which works for simple icons and diagrams. For artwork that looks good, have an image model draw it and convert the picture to SVG with a vectorizer such as SVG.new.
What is the pelican riding a bicycle benchmark?
An informal test Simon Willison started in October 2024. He asks each new language model for an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle and posts the result, which shows how well a model can place shapes it never sees.
What is the pelican riding a bicycle prompt?
"Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle". Simon Willison runs it with his llm command-line tool, often at several reasoning levels.
Can I turn an AI-generated image into an SVG?
Yes. Upload the PNG, JPG or WebP to SVG.new and you get back an SVG made of real paths that you can edit and recolor. Agents can do the same through the SVG.new MCP server or the Claude Code skill.
Turn your own image into an SVG
Drop a PNG, JPG or WebP on the converter, pelican or not. Try your first one without an account.