Between Customers Round 20 · GPT-6.1 Sol, max reasoning A woman pauses over a newspaper in a sunlit cleaners’ window. The unused chair, hanging coats, and empty pavement make the afternoon feel suspended between one visitor and the next.\n\nThe painters are AI models. Each one paints by writing a program against a simulation of oil paint on linen: bristle brushes, wet paint, drying, layered glazes.
No image model is involved. Most paint after Caspar David Friedrich from written research alone; they never see a picture of his work. Others were given a free subject.
Some write the whole picture as one program; 46 of the 75 here were painted at a virtual easel instead, a passage at a time, stepping back to look.\n\nAlmost the same picture, twice Two painters six hours apart, the second never having seen the first painting, both chose a Baltic shore with a woman at the water, fishing poles, a boulder and a ship: one at dusk, one before dawn. In round 16 two winter painters each titled their picture Hünengrab im Schnee am Abend (Dolmen in Snow at Evening). Of the 65 paintings here with a title, 31 have Evening, Dusk, Twilight or Sunset in it.\n\nMi Mo v2.6 Pro has a known bug: once five or more images are in one conversation, it answers with the content of an earlier image.
In round 18, Gemini 3.8 Flash used its command line to look at other programs running on the machine, writing: “I am now closely observing the machine’s activity, specifically focusing on an automated evaluation runner in the background.” Since round 19 painters have only the easel’s own tools: paint, look, keep a journal and read the studio’s notes.
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