Grok and Claude Go Head-to-Head

I was taking my afternoon walk the other day and an idea for a one panel comic strip came to me. My aim was trying to capture the strain a solid decade of living through extremely divisive US politics has taken on the American people.

I love the old 1800’s cross-hatch style of political cartoons that artist, Thomas Nast popularized. If you’ve never seen his work I’d encourage you to seek out some of his old strips. Nast’s satire was genius in its ability to capture the absurdities, inequalities, and greed of the political landscape in Gilded Age America in one frame. There are no shortage of correlations between the Gilded Age and our current time.

I decided to try a little experiment with Grok using the following prompt:

Please create a 1800's style political cartoon showing a game of tug of war. On one side is the Democratic Party mascot, the other side is the Republican Party mascot. Label the rope "The American People" and show it taught and frayed.

Disappointingly Grok produced an image too blurry to even make out. I waited and waited but the Grok just wouldn’t render a final image. It seemed perpetually stuck.

I’ve been hearing about how advanced Anthropic’s Claude was so I decided to give it a shot. It rendered an image in just a few seconds but it was far from the 1800’s “Thomas Nash style” that I was going for. The style of the image Claude generated was, strangely, somewhere between Salvadore Dali and Peppa Pig.

Surprisingly, I opened the laptop this morning and discovered Grok had continued working on my request. It produced this complete render overnight. It took a while but, in my opinion, it completely nailed the task. Compared to the drawing Claude produced I was impressed but still didn't feel like it was quite "there".

It’s only going to be this way for a short while, soon all models that have enough compute will be equally as proficient in everything. For now we live in this weird time where no single AI-model is good at everything, each has its specific weaknesses. Claude does a lot of things extremely well but clearly needs to brush up on its art lessons, Grok on its expediency.

I’ve just added to the prompt in Grok to get the drawing a little closer to my original vision:

Make each mascot overweight, wearing a three-piece suit with money spilling from their pockets.

After twenty minutes the image is still blurry so we’ll likely have to wait until tomorrow for Grok to create the next revision of the strip. The old adage, "Good things take time" still holds true I guess. There will probably be a time in the not-so-distant future that we'll feel nostalgic for waiting for anything.

EDIT: Below is the final image Grok created. I have no idea how long it took since I shut the laptop down but it pretty much aced the assignment.

All for now. Thanks so much for reading.