Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas

It’s interesting how diffusion models are getting bitter lessened by LLMs. I suspect anthropic has tens of thousands of RL environments recreating famous paintings with code because it was anthropic employees who first started posting about these capabilities on X.

Opus is also getting decent pixel art. I have ran some experiments with Opus 5.5 to turn 90s pinball displays (black and white pixel art) into double resolution colored remastered pixels.

https://files.catbox.moe/tbx2u7.png

I prompted it a lot but didn’t draw any pixels. Seems to be bad at hands still. I think a skilled pixel artist could greatly speed up their work with Claude code.

It also makes me sad for artists. They didn’t get paid much anyway. Art should be something human to human like writing text. Although, most large commercial art products (marvel movies) already lack any human to human connection you see in paintings or indie games. The large commercial art products will be 50% AI soon.

I love this! It's heading in a very similar direction I am passionate about!

If we are generating artifacts with AI, they should be made out of source code or other form of project file that humans can actually inspect and learn from. I'm doing the same with music: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/0009-when-we-become-discoverer...

This is simultaneously incredibly impressive and annoyingly uncanny valley, since most of the landscapes are "ruined" by a cluster of churches right next to each other that is completely nonsensical.

This is interesting. I've been trying with less success to evolve a good painter that writes its own tools https://artifacts.dizzard.net/s/55052743-bee1-4746-b59e-57e2... (sorry for the load)

Also Pindar Van Arman's prior work acts as a reminder that AI, no matter how powerful, is a tool, not an artist. Pindar's stuff is all non-LLM as far I can tell, but I don't see a fundamental difference in it. I'm sure _humans_ will make continue making really cool art with these new tools https://www.vanarman.com/

This is in the same space as this creative exploration posted a few months ago -

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Training AI to Paint with Code, March 2026

https://surya.website/rling-qwen-to-paint-with-code

HN Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411800

Thesis presentation:

https://vimeo.com/1190839818

And I believe the HN user who created this is @kickingkeys

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fascinating space to explore:

Instead of having AI directly generate an output, what happens if we ask AI to take a stab at the PROCESS of creating something.

The site doesn't make clear whether the models are looking at the image while they work on it, but the code includes a "look" tool they can call: "Every painter sees its looks at its provider's best image resolution."

https://github.com/aliceisjustplaying/claude-paint/blob/f038...

It would have freaked me out if they could do this well without that, especially the dumber models.

I love the canvases, and truly would like to have a bit more inside on the process this specific author used to reach the results shown. I have read Surya's "Training AI to Paint with Code" but, what's Alice's technique?

Poor fella... I tuned in at an awkward time apparently, right after the work in progress was painted over with an ugly brown:

> Catastrophe. The glaze pass with medium 0.35 over everywhere() at coverage 0.8 with a filbert 26 at pressure 0.44 laid an enormous broken "brick/cobblestone" texture over the entire painting. The medium made it too fluid and the brush's dry-brush pattern created a heavy reptilian texture, obliterating the picture. I need to undo this....

I’m a bit behind the times…

How does Opus actually paint? Thought it only generated text…

Very interesting. I think a useful experiment would be to show AI a photograph, then ask it to paint it or draw it.

This is such a good idea. Idk how to make this a benchmark, but it should be (maybe elo?).

Should be a Twtich stream tbh

What capability makes this possible? It’s incredible! Does it have an image-generation model?

they missed a huge opportunity to name this Claude Monet

I find it unlikely that there's any direct training data for this. I'm talking about direct training data for using brush strokes like humans to construct an image.

Correct me if I'm wrong but this shows that painting capability is emergent, arising from unrelated training data thus very very compelling evidence that LLMs are actually intelligent.

Now combine this with a robot able to move a paint brush and mix on a palette, and you could make some pretty awesome real-paint artwork

I don’t like how it’s a human aiming to portray the ai generation with their taste and judgements about it but then becoming lazy and quitting on that and leaving in the ai generated portrayal about its own judgment in the site.

Just share your opinions, dude, we get its ai generated but share your own taste. We want to know what YOU think. Stop being shy and lazy.

What a misanthropic thing to make. I'm embarrassed for you.