The "Emoji Test" on Popular AI Models

@CaylaCatz recently put out a blog about using nothing but emojis for the prompt (https://budgetpixel.com/blog/emoji-mini-dictionary-part-1-people-activities); it looked like so much fun that I just HAD TO give it a try. Of course, being the difficult client I am, there is no way I would make things easy for the AI bots. So I gave them a string of emojis that do not seem to make sense together: 👴🏽🪖👘🎀🛼🥂🏀.

First up was good old Chat GPT. To its credit, I have to say it did pretty darn well with these ransom objects--all seven are included in one neat package.

Z Image Turbo, on the other hand, is clearly less inclined to indulge my chaotic mind. So out of "👴🏽🪖👘🎀🛼🥂🏀", I got this picture:

A perfectly normal scene--and that's exactly the abnormal part of it. But my main question is: Where in the world did the kid come from?

Similarly, P-Image completely went off track--all I got from it is 👴🏽 and none of the others parts of the prompt.

Incidentally, I had never used P-Image prior to this, and I decided to give it a test run only because it's so cheap on BP. The introduction says that it is based on Alibaba's Qwen, so it really shouldn't be this bad.

Qwen itself, though, gave me an entirely different interpretation of the prompt. It obviously does not like the idea of a cross-dressing old man, since everything here has been rendered "gender-appropriate." As to the peaked cap in lieu of the helmet...well, it's peace time, after all.

Here's Flux's interpretation of "👴🏽🪖👘🎀🛼🥂🏀." It substituted the kimono with a bath robe, but the whole thing is put together pretty well. Somehow, the pic kind of reminds me of the French foreign legion on parade. 😅

Next, we have Minimax. Again everything is sort of there if we accept the bathrobe and the non-regulation basketball, but for some reason Minimax decided to make our fun-loving old man look rather sinister.

Then it's Elon Musk's turn with his Grok. Clearly Grok tried to make sense out of these emojis that have little connection to one another and create a measure of normalcy out of the chaos, so it resorted to "divide and conquer." By distributing the objects among different characters, Grok managed to include all seven items listed in the prompt (if, again, we accept the peaked cap for the helmet) and come up with a scene that is actually quite "normal." A feather for Elon's hat for this demonstration of smarts!

But of course, there is no way I'd let Grok off the hook that easily. To its credit, when I tell it to combine all seven emojis on the same character, Grok soon got the idea and asked me whether I wanted the scene to be more chaotic. Well, heck yeah! So, here's what we ended up with from Grok.

Next, here's an interesting one by Midjourney--everything is sort of there, but not quite: old fella--check; roller skates--check; helmet--we got a military beret instead; kimono--a traditional Chinese outfit is close enough (geographically speaking); bow--a silk ribbon will do; champagne glass--a wine glass with whisky in it isn't too bad; basketball--I guess the stop watch is from the same department.

The next pic is what Nano Banana came up with in response to the prompt "👴🏽🪖👘🎀🛼🥂🏀," and once again it is one of my favorite. In addition to putting all seven elements into the one coherent package, it actually put the sports equipment into action, unlike the other models, and made the whole thing work in a rather convincing scene. (BTW, did you know that roller skate basketball is an actual sport, and it even has a professional league with ten teams playing on national TV in India? I just found that out because of this...you learn something new every day!)

Last but not least, the rendition by another of my favorite models, SeeDream. This was from SeeDream 5.0, and typically I like SeeDream 4.5, 4.0, or even 3.0 better than 5.0 because the pics made with 5.0 tend to be too stylized to look "real," but in this particular case I'd say the style it picked worked perfectly with the subject.

Some of you may want to defend the AI models that did not do so well in this test by saying that those seven emojis are never meant to belong together. Oh yeah? Try this:

“Coach Ogawa promised the girls on the basketball team that, if they won the regional championship, he would come to the celebration on roller skates, wearing his wife’s kimono, and let them break a champagne bottle on his head.” 😊