Special: Why are AIs so bad at diagramming?

 I've been reading about all of the wonderful illustrations that current AI systems can make... 

Generated by Gemini 2.0 Flash (May 13, 2025) 

The prose I've been reading is frankly astonishing and heavy on praise for the remarkable things AIs can create.  And while it's true that seeing a green-horse galloping across the heavens in a spacesuit, or a corgi living in a house made of sushi is astounding, that's not the kind of thing I want or need for my everyday work.  

I often want a fairly simple explanatory diagram of how something works.  

Turns out that I wanted a neat, clean, simple diagram of the positions for each of the 9 players on an American baseball diamond.  How hard could it be?  Answer: VERY hard.  What I wanted was something like this diagram below:  

Image by Wikipedia author Cburnett.  Original.  

But I didn't want all of the measurements and extra annotations, so I thought "What a perfect application for an AI!"  

That's what I thought.  Now I realize that AI graphics creation systems are truly terrible at making diagrams of even simple things.  I gave the prompt: [create a diagram of the positions of the players on a baseball diamond]  This is Gemini 2.5 Pro: 

Gemini 2.5 Pro's diagram of a baseball diamond. (May 13, 2025) 

Seems really, really, really wrong.  There should be 9 players, not 12. I don't see a pitcher anywhere, but I AM surprised to see the "First Baenan" at second base, and the "Convergeder" catching behind the plate.  Those are both hallucinations of players in some bizarre intergalactic baseball game.  

Here's the slightly better diagram made by the earlier (and presumably less capable) Gemini 2.0 Flash.   

Kind of right, but the pitcher is in the wrong place, and I don't know what "Fiird Base" is.
P/C Gemini 2.0 Flash.  

But other systems get it even wronger... this is Claude's attempt: 

Claude's attempt to show the player positions on a baseball diamond.  

Wow!  That's truly awful.  But the bigger surprise is that ALL of the AI systems can't make decent diagrams.  

Here's an attempt to draw the player positions on a soccer field: 

A truly strange diagram of soccer players on the field with mysterious arrows and
odd positions like "Staupbol." (Gemini 2.0 Flash)

It gets even weirder when you ask for diagrams that are more difficult to fact check.  But an MD might be astonished by this diagram of the blood circulation system: 

Gemini's diagram of the human blood circulatory system. There's so much wrong here I don't know where to begin.  I'm glad to report that MY "Orchomatury" artery is intact.  If your circulatory system looks like this, please check in with your physician.  

Even diagrams that should have been simple proved beyond AIs capability.  When I asked for a timeline of the major events of the US Civil War, Gemini 2.5 just flat out refused.  "Sorry, I can't draw diagrams."  When I pointed out that it JUST drew a few diagrams, it gave a long argument about why a timeline is just too complicated.  (And a human circulatory system is simpler?)  

By contrast, Perplexity was happy to give me a diagram of the US Civil War: 

Perplexity's diagram of the US Civil War.  Done not long after I asked it for a baseball diagram.  

I thought to ask Midjourney the same question:  [diagram of the main events of the US Civil War] 

Midjourney's diagram of the main events of the US Civil War (May 13, 2025) The text is illegible. 

I could go on in this vein.  In fact, I DID go on in this vein, trying different prompts and different kinds of diagrams.  I'll spare you the gory details--let's just say it was an entertaining but unproductive couple of hours.  

SearchResearch Lesson 

Do NOT rely on any current AI systems to give you a decent diagram.  If you're asking about something that you don't understand deeply, you're MUCH better off doing a classical web image search.  

Keep Searching!