About whether language models like ChatGPT can understand or generate images and ASCII art.
Has this happened?
Yes 63 (45%)Not sure 62 (45%)No 14 (10%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether language models like ChatGPT can understand or generate images and ASCII art.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
GP likely meant GPT-4 (the LLM), not ChatGPT the product as a whole (which has additional models for doing things with images).
Feed original (not copy-pasted from the web) ASCII art of a foot into GPT-4 and I'd be very impressed if it can tell you it's a foot.
I'm actually mildly impressed it could generate ASCII art of a car, because that's a lot better than I've been able to get out of it (albeit on gpt3.5). Try anything more complex and I believe you'll see it's limitations.