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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

Nice. It looks like it's not really focusing much on the task and just drawing something by heart; then when asked for the third time it finally produces a much simpler and smaller design that actually resembles some kind of bird. As if this was the actual real effort.

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You say that like it has an understanding. If I could have forked the conversation after it gave a unicorn I would have, but I was able to start my own and ask for ASCII art of a parrot. On the first try it gave me a sitting penguin (probably Tux art from the training data)

When I then asked it if the image was really a parrot it told me that it was "more of a generic 'ASCII bird' (often used as a generic owl/parrot placeholder), not a true parrot."

A sitting penguin is certainly not a generic bird.

   __
  (o)>
  //\
  V_/_

That's what you might expect a generic sitting penguin to look like, but this is what it actually gave me

      .---.
     /     \
     \.@-@./
     /`\_/`\
    //  _  \\
   | \     )|_
  /`\_`>  <_/ \
  \__/'---'\__/

Definitely a Linux Tux penguin

Yes. Well, it doesn't really "see" the ascii art it's producing because it's blind and it's just reading and writing it as if it were text- so the task is much more complex than it seems to us. I do notice a difference between the first attempt (and your sitting penguin) and the small art at the end. If you've used gpt5, it's possible that it decided to engage its full capacity only at that point, and that the previous answers were less thought through.

But yes I do believe these things understand. There is no other way for them to do what they're doing.

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