this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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Do you like (AI) clocks? (clocks.brianmoore.com)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by LegoBrickOnFire@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 91 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Is it just me or the clocks frequently break or change appearance without the page being refreshed?

Edit: nevermind, I skipped past the sentence explaining that every minute, the site prompts LLMs for a new solution. This is hilariously sad how LLMs aren't able to be consistent from one prompt to another.

[–] Carighan@piefed.world 42 points 10 months ago

It's the expected result if your big ol' artificial intelligence wannabe is ultimately just a stochastic word combinator.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

if every single token is, at the end, chosen by random dice roll (and they are) then this is exactly what you'd expect.

[–] kersplomp@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 10 months ago (5 children)

that’s a massive oversimplification

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[–] null@piefed.nullspace.lol 3 points 10 months ago

This is hilariously sad how LLMs aren’t able to be consistent from one prompt to another.

Typically that's configurable. Like for a chatbot, you'd want it to give the same/similar results for a given question, where with a character creator, you might want the results to vary so you can re-run until you get something you like.

Of course that wouldn't be as funny here.

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[–] criticon@lemmy.ca 71 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] Shaper@lemmy.world 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 59 points 10 months ago (4 children)

The last one, Kimi K2, has been consistently good as long as I've been looking at it. That's pretty impressive.

The rest are hilarious!

[–] reseller_pledge609@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 10 months ago

Deepseek has a recognisable clock now and then, too. They both mix up the current time, though.

[–] huppakee@piefed.social 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

By far the best, but still off. These three were loaded in the same order as i post them:

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

I dig the square clock, and am now sad that the numbers can't be put into the corners on a real clock. Unless they're shifted from the usual position.

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[–] Hazzard@lemmy.zip 13 points 10 months ago

Haha, I found myself thinking the same thing, and then caught myself, realizing all the other LLMs on this page had lowered the bar immensely for what I'm considering impressive.

[–] Enkrod@feddit.org 12 points 10 months ago

I thought the same and then Kimi K2 came up with a clock that has two 12 and no 11...

[–] crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's funny how GPT-5 is consistently the worst one, and it's not even close.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 18 points 10 months ago

qwen 2.5 is absolutely pants on head ridiculous compared to gpt5 when I'm looking at it right now.

[–] dimjim@sh.itjust.works 22 points 10 months ago

Some of these are absolutely hilarious

[–] sheepishly@fedia.io 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Given that the AI models are basically constructing these "blindly"- using the language model to string together html and javascript without really being able to check how it looks- some of these are actually pretty impressive. But also making the AI do things it's bad at is funny. Reminds me of all the AI ASCII art fails...

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[–] QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

qwen is trying her best 😭😔

[–] zerofk@lemmy.zip 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

So far, I’d give qwen the prize for most artistic impression of a clock.

Kimi K2 appears to consistently get it right.

[–] zerofk@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 months ago

And just as I typed that, Kimi made one where 9 and 10, and 11 and 12 overlapped.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What is this obsession with clocks recently?

[–] Panties@lemmy.ca 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know if it's actually related, but I've read that asking people to draw a clock face is a simple way to identify some brain problems

Quick screening for dementia, according to this

Edit: I guess this means most of the AI has 'Conceptual Deficits', pretty accurate lol

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Would be funny if AI models are generating such wildly useless "clocks" because they ingested too many dementia screening tests in their training data

[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 10 months ago

There is someone training the biggest, bestest model to draw clock faces to pass that test as we speak.

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 10 points 10 months ago

I'm guessing it's an easy metric to compare benchmarks. "Write a clock".

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 10 points 10 months ago

I don't even

I was surprised that both Grok and Gemini 2.5 got it right once, only to fuck it up on the refresh

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Not really world clocks, they just try to use JavaScript to display the device's time.

[–] TechLich@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

No JavaScript I think, it's just html and CSS. The initial time is provided in the prompt every minute according to the description. I wonder if they'd be any better if they could use js. Probably not.

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

"Time is a relative of mine" / Eisenstein

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 7 points 10 months ago

You know, I don't, and what the fuck?

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Deepseek seems to have the only functional clock.

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

Depends on when you load it. They refresh every minute. In the first one I got, Deepseek's was almost functional, but Haiku had one that was surprisingly good.

I've never seen any of the OpenAI models come up with anything that was more than completely broken.

[–] huppakee@piefed.social 4 points 10 months ago

I thought the same, until it refreshed and it got worse and it refreshed and it was different but still bad. These three were loaded in the order as posted:

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well, KIMI K2 seems to have created the working one. Others failed. I suppose that this model was optimized for this while others not.

[–] SolarBoy@slrpnk.net 8 points 10 months ago

The clocks change every minute. I've seen some from deepseek and qwen that looked ok. But kimi seems to be the most consistent

[–] kersplomp@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Really cool idea, but the site seems a bit biased for the chinese models, or is otherwise set up weird. I’m not able to reproduce how consistently bad the others are in web dev arena, which generally accepted as the gold standard for testing AI web dev ability.

[–] AppleTea@lemmy.zip 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock. Here is its prompt: Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.

are you using the same prompt?

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[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Another reason why, while AI might be a fun toy, no one who is serious about getting work done will touch it with a dirty barge pole. The gratuitous hallucinations alone ought to be a sufficient deterrent.

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