THE VIDEO SHELF · ai image generation limits
Why ChatGPT Can't Draw a Full Glass of Wine
Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN treats it as the origin of the full-wine-glass meme and an illustration of how models lack concepts missing from their training data.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Alex O'Connor
- Topic
- ai image generation limits
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 5
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2025–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
I completely agree. You can see this limitation if you try to create anything complex with the current state of the art. There is also a great video by Alex O'Connor on a simple prompt to generate a full glass of wine, which illustrates this …
proc0 on Hacker News · 2025-02
In AI Is Already Obsolete – The Open Challenge No One Will AnswerI think you're looking at it too abstractly. An LLM isn't representing anything, it has a bag of numbers that some other algorithm produced for it. When you give it some numbers, it takes them and does matrix operations with them in order to randomly …
jimbo808 on Hacker News · 2025-09
In Getting AI to work in complex codebases
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.