---
title: "The Emperor Pelican Has No Clothes"
slug: the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes
url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes
canonical_url: https://arcfu.com/post/the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes/
content_type: essay
language: en
published_at: 2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2026-10-16T02:13:05.502Z
author: "Aman Rusia"
authored_by: human
publisher: "arcfu"
publisher_url: https://arcfu.com/
topics: ["AI", "Machine Learning", "Visualization"]
license: all-rights-reserved
word_count: 87
reading_minutes: 1
citation: "Aman Rusia, arcfu. \"The Emperor Pelican Has No Clothes.\" 14 Oct 2026. https://arcfu.com/post/the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes/ (all-rights-reserved)"
---

# The Emperor Pelican Has No Clothes

> Aman Rusia shows that frontier LLMs keep drawing nearly identical SVG pelicans on a bicycle—and contrasts that collapse with diverse human-drawn alternatives, calling it an LLM diversity collapse problem.

Why do all LLM pelicans look like this?

When given the prompt `Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle`.

![Thirteen pelicans riding bicycles from recent LLMs, with each model labelled](https://arcfu.com/post/the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes/model-grid.png)

Original SVGs from [Simon Willison’s runs](https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/) · highest reasoning setting that returned an SVG

When they could look like these?

![Twelve diverse pelicans riding bicycles: a royal parade, monsoon, polar night, alpine race, desert, fog, neon alley, wedding, market, Victorian promenade, storm and Moon](https://arcfu.com/post/the-emperor-pelican-has-no-clothes/diverse-grid.png)

This is the LLM diversity collapse problem no one is talking about.

---