Poem prompts from one image: every AI model's reply, tested

Give me 5 original writing prompts on this theme, numbered, each one to three sentences with something at stake. Make them poem prompts: an image or a moment to write a poem from.

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The sea in winter.

How the Writing prompt generator's test inputs are scored, with every model's results on all five.

1. Claude Haiku 4.5

   Failed: Graded 3.7 of 5 on average (lowest 3).

   1. A lighthouse keeper finds a bottle wedged between rocks on a frozen shore, its glass so cold it burns her bare hand—but she can't let go, and inside, a single line of handwriting glows faintly in the dark.
   
   2. You stand at the edge of a winter beach where the waves have stopped mid-crash, suspended like glass, and you realize you've been standing here for hours or days without feeling cold or hungry or time passing at all.
   
   3. An old fisherman returns to the exact spot where his boat sank thirty years ago, now solid ice, and sees a shape moving beneath the surface that wears his face.
   
   4. The sea in winter has turned the color of pewter and silence, and your child asks why the water stopped singing—you don't know the answer, and you're terrified of what it means.
   
   5. You find a message scratched into ice with fingernails, still bleeding at the edges, addressed to someone you loved who drowned in summer, written in handwriting that hasn't existed for centuries.

   315 tokens in, 231 out · 3.7 s · $0.0015 · 1 message on Pro · answered by anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 via Azure · September 28, 2026

2. GPT-6 Luna

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. At dawn, Mara finds a red mitten frozen into the seaweed on a winter beach; write a poem about what the tide might return with it.
   
   2. A harbor buoy keeps ringing through a night of thick snow, though no boats are near. Write from the buoy’s point of view as the sound begins to change.
   
   3. On the last cold morning before the fishing town closes for the season, a child carries a jar of seawater home. Write a poem about what the sea keeps, and what the child hopes to save.
   
   4. The winter sea has swallowed the steps to an old lighthouse, leaving only the lamp above the waves. Write a poem about the keeper deciding whether to stay through one more storm.
   
   5. Along the dark shore, a woman reads her brother’s unsent letter aloud to the waves. Write a poem in which the sea’s reply could be comfort—or a warning.

   295 tokens in, 188 out · 2.6 s · $0.0001 · 1 message on Pro · answered by openai/gpt-6-luna via OpenAI · September 28, 2026

3. GLM 5.3 Flash

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. A lone lighthouse keeper on the Cornish coast watches the first winter storm roll in, knowing the bulb has just flickered for the first time.
   2. A woman stands on an empty February beach, holding an envelope of her brother's ashes, while the grey tide erases her footprints faster than she can make them.
   3. In a harbour town where the fishing boats have been hauled ashore for the season, an old man repairs nets he may never cast again.
   4. Write from the point of view of a message in a bottle, frozen into the ice of a tidal pool, waiting for a thaw that may not come.
   5. Two children dared each other into the January surf; one went in, and the poem is the single minute between the wave breaking and him coming up.

   306 tokens in, 166 out · 13.9 s · $0.0001 · 1 message on Pro · answered by z-ai/glm-5.3-flash via Friendli · September 28, 2026

4. Claude Haiku 5.5

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. A widow who has walked the same grey shingle beach every morning since her husband's boat was lost in January finds a child's red mitten half-buried in the wrack line. She has never let herself go past the groyne, and today the tide is pulling the mitten further out. Write a poem from the moment she decides whether to wade in after it.
   
   2. A lighthouse keeper's daughter, home from the city for the first winter storm in eleven years, watches her father's hands shake as he polishes the lens. The sea below has taken the lower steps overnight. Write a poem set in the lamp room during the hour before the light must be lit.
   
   3. Along a frozen harbour in Newfoundland, a retired fish-plant worker named Ruth Keel cuts a hole in the ice each dawn to check a single mooring line she tied decades ago. This morning the line has gone slack for the first time. Write a poem from the moment she hauls it up hand over hand.
   
   4. A teenage boy sneaks out on New Year's Eve to the empty beach where he and his brother used to light fireworks, carrying a box of matches and a sparkler he was told never to bring. The brother is three hundred miles away and not answering his phone. Write a poem from the instant the sparkler catches in the wind off the black water.
   
   5. A wind-chapped surveyor is alone on a sea wall in December, measuring how many metres the waves have eaten since last year, and the numbers are worse than his council wanted to hear. He pockets the clipboard, sits on the cold concrete, and listens to the sea breathe in the gaps between stones. Write a poem from the moment he decides whether to file the true figure.

   397 tokens in, 531 out · 4.6 s · $0.0003 · 1 message on Pro · answered by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5 via Anthropic · October 7, 2026

5. Gemini 3.8 Flash

   Passed: Graded 4.3 of 5 on average (lowest 3).

   1. Clara walks along the deserted boardwalk in January, watching the tide freeze into slush against the pilings. Write a poem about the salt crusting on her woolen sleeves as she decides whether to cast her mother's gold wedding band into the gray water.
   
   2. At dawn on an empty Maine headland, black sea ducks dive through floating sheets of grease-ice while the lighthouse beacon sweeps across the foam. Focus on the sharp contrast between the suffocating cold of the wind and the hidden, violent warmth of life moving beneath the surface.
   
   3. An old fisherman stands on the dock of a shuttered harbor town, scraping rime from the hull of a boat he swore he would sell before the snow fell. Use the image of frozen diesel, stiff mooring ropes, and the sea's quiet, iron-colored ache to explore why some men cannot bear to leave what hurts them.
   
   4. A child's red mitten lies half-buried in the frozen shingle beach at low tide, stiffened with brine and ringed with dried kelp. Capture the silence of a tourist town emptied of summer laughter, where the ocean retreats like an uncaring witness to an unspoken loss.
   
   5. On the coldest night of the year, vapor rises like steam from the dark Atlantic into the freezing air, blurring the line between sea and sky. Write a poem addressed to someone absent, centering on the sea smoke that makes the water appear to be burning while turning everything it touches into ice.

   308 tokens in, 303 out · 4.1 s · $0.0007 · 1 message on Pro · answered by google/gemini-3.8-flash via Google AI Studio · September 28, 2026

6. GLM 5.3

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. The last fishing boat of the season sits frozen into the harbor ice at Tromsø, and its owner walks out to it each evening as if it might still answer him. Write a poem from one of those walks.
   
   2. A beach in February: an abandoned glove half-buried in wet sand, fingers pointing toward the water. What was lost here, and who hasn't stopped looking?
   
   3. Winter waves at dusk, gray on gray, until a single gull crosses the light and everything briefly turns silver. Write a poem about one moment of surprise in a colorless season.
   
   4. Your grandmother's house overlooks the North Sea, and every January she says the sea is "closer" then—she swears the tide rises higher in winter, or the land sinks. Write a poem from her kitchen window.
   
   5. Salt spray freezes on the black rocks of a seawall, forming crystals that will shatter at the next storm. Write a poem about something beautiful that exists only because it is about to be destroyed.

   306 tokens in, 214 out · 2.5 s · $0.0010 · 1 message on Pro · answered by z-ai/glm-5.3 via Friendli · September 28, 2026

7. GPT-6 Sol

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. At dawn, Mara finds a single red glove frozen into the sand above the winter tide line. Write a poem from the moment the waves begin to reach for it.
   
   2. On the last ferry of the day, a deckhand watches a gull struggle against the wind while the mainland disappears in sleet. Write a poem about what it means to keep crossing.
   
   3. After a storm, a child finds the sea has returned every stone to the beach except the smooth black one she buried for her father. Write a poem from the search.
   
   4. At a deserted harbor, the ropes of empty boats knock against their masts as ice forms along the pier. Write a poem in which someone must decide whether to untie one.
   
   5. A lighthouse keeper opens the door to find a wave has left a starfish on the top step, far above the usual tide. Write a poem about the small life exposed to winter air.

   295 tokens in, 192 out · 3.3 s · $0.0013 · 1 message on Pro · answered by openai/gpt-6-sol via OpenAI · September 28, 2026

8. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. Every January your grandmother walks into the sea at Ballycotton in her nightdress, and this year you are the one left on the shingle holding her shoes, counting the grey minutes until her head comes back up. The water is four degrees, she has never said why she does it, and she started the winter your grandfather's boat didn't come home.
   
   2. The hour after a storm when the tide pulls back and the whole beach is strewn with cuttlefish bones, frayed rope, and one child's red boot, and you are walking it alone because the person who should be beside you has been gone three weeks. You have until the next wave to decide what you will do with the boot.
   
   3. Ice has sealed the rock pools and a seal is watching you from twenty feet out, its head dark and patient as a wet stone. You have stood still so long that your fingers have gone white, and you no longer know which of you is waiting for the other to leave first.
   
   4. On a February ferry the deck is empty except for you and a man in a damp suit who keeps folding and unfolding a paper napkin with a name written on it, while the sea does that slow winter thing where it never crashes, only breathes under the hull. He asks whether you would post something for him once you reach the other side.
   
   5. It is the last night of the herring season, one small boat, one lamp, the cold so sharp the stars seem to be ringing, and the nets come up empty for the third time. Your father says nothing, only turns the boat for home, and you understand that something is ending here that has nothing to do with fish.

   324 tokens in, 1,110 out (757 of them reasoning) · 5.8 s · $0.0014 · 1 message on Pro · answered by deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash via Together · October 8, 2026

9. GPT-6.1 Sol

   Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

   1. At the winter sea, Mara finds her father’s red glove frozen into the tide line, years after his boat disappeared. Write a poem held between the urge to pick it up and the fear that it belongs to someone still alive.
   
   2. A seaside café owner carries the last chair indoors as winter waves climb the steps, leaving a circle of dry sand where its legs stood. Write a poem from this small, temporary shelter and the question of what can still be saved.
   
   3. On New Year’s morning, two estranged sisters stand beside the winter sea, passing a chipped thermos between them without speaking. Write a poem in which the warmth runs out before either finds the words she came to say.
   
   4. A child in yellow boots builds a snowman facing the winter sea and gives it the house key her parents have told her no longer fits. Write a poem from the moment she notices the tide approaching its feet.
   
   5. At a winter beach, an elderly swimmer folds his trousers over a bench and walks laughing into water cold enough to stop his heart. Write a poem from the shore, where his dog waits beside the clothes, unable to tell delight from danger.

   295 tokens in, 241 out · 5.3 s · $0.0015 · 1 message on Pro · answered by openai/gpt-6.1-sol via OpenAI · September 29, 2026

10. Kimi K3

    Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

    1. A poem about a woman walking a grey winter beach who finds a single green glass bottle washed up, still corked, with something rolled inside she can't reach. Write from the moment before she decides whether to break it.
    
    2. A poem from the viewpoint of a lighthouse keeper on his last night before the light is automated, describing the sea he has watched for forty years. Something in the dark water tonight looks different, and he cannot name it.
    
    3. A poem about the moment a frozen harbor finally cracks at the end of winter, heard from inside a fisherman's cottage by a child who has never known the water open. What does the sound promise, and what does it take back?
    
    4. A poem about a swimmer who enters the icy sea alone at dawn in January, and the three minutes her body spends between shock and warmth. Let the poem hold what she goes into the water to forget.
    
    5. A poem about two brothers scattering their father's ashes into a rough winter sea, and the wind that blows half of them back onto their coats. Write the moment they stop brushing themselves off and start to laugh or cry.

    382 tokens in, 265 out (26 of them reasoning) · 8.1 s · $0.0025 · 1 message on Pro · answered by moonshotai/kimi-k3 via Wafer · September 28, 2026

11. Claude Sonnet 5

    Passed: Graded 4.3 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

    1. A fisherman's wife stands at the frozen edge of the harbor, watching the ice creep further out than it has in living memory, and touches the boat her husband never returned to dock. Write a poem from the moment her breath fogs the air over the water that will not let her mourn or hope in peace.
    
    2. Gulls stand motionless on a shelf of gray ice, feathers ruffled by a wind that smells of salt and nothing else, while a lighthouse keeper counts the days since the last ship passed. Write a poem from the stillness before he decides whether to keep the light burning.
    
    3. A child drags a stick along the shoreline, drawing a line the tide erases within seconds, again and again, as the winter sun sinks fast behind slate-colored clouds. Write a poem from the moment the child realizes the line will never last, and draws it anyway.
    
    4. Waves the color of iron slam against a pier where a single rope still holds a boat that should have been hauled in weeks ago. Write a poem from the perspective of someone watching that rope fray, thread by thread, in the cold light of afternoon.
    
    5. An old woman walks the beach every dawn in winter, collecting nothing, speaking to no one, until the morning she finds a single shoe half-buried in frozen sand. Write a poem from the moment her hand hesitates over it, deciding whether to dig the rest free.

    395 tokens in, 442 out · 7.8 s · $0.0052 · 1 message on Pro · answered by anthropic/claude-sonnet-5 via Anthropic · September 28, 2026

12. Claude Sonnet 5.5

    Passed: Graded 5.0 of 5 on average (lowest 5).

    1. At the end of January, Marisol walks the empty seafront at Aldeburgh and finds a single child's red boot filled with grey water at the tideline. Write the poem that begins with what she decides to do with it, and what it costs her to leave it or carry it home.
    
    2. The last ferry of the season pulls out from the harbour at Stromness, and the deckhand is the only one who notices the gulls have stopped following it. Write a poem from that silence, and from what he suspects the birds know about the water ahead.
    
    3. Your grandfather swam in the North Sea every New Year's Day until the year he didn't, and you have come alone to do it in his place, with his towel and his cold-blue lips in your memory. Write the poem of the moment your feet leave the shingle and the sea makes its first claim on you.
    
    4. A lighthouse keeper's log from 1911 records only weather for forty days, until one entry reads, "Sea the colour of a knife. Did not sleep. Heard my name." Write a poem in the voice of the sea, answering him.
    
    5. Frost has crusted the rope, the hull, and the bait bucket, and Teodor must decide at dawn whether to take his small boat out past the breakwater, since the debt on it comes due at month's end. Write a poem in the few held breaths before he casts off, when the winter sea is flat, bright, and offering nothing.

    397 tokens in, 442 out · 5.8 s · $0.0052 · 1 message on Pro · answered by anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5 via Anthropic · September 28, 2026

13. DeepSeek V4 Pro

    Passed: Graded 4.3 of 5 on average (lowest 3).

    1. Maren walks to the end of the salt-crusted pier, where the February sea has frozen into grey plates; under each step, the ice beneath the pilings shifts and cracks, and the tide is already turning away from the shore she left.
    
    2. Old fisherman Torvald drags his wooden boat up the shingle one last time before the harbor freezes, then stands in the blowing snow deciding whether to burn it for heat or leave it to be crushed by the ice.
    
    3. From the lighthouse tower, nine-year-old Adi watches snow dissolve into the black January sea, clutching a corked bottle with a note for her father whose boat went down in these same waters a year ago; if she throws it now, she may never know whether he got the message or the sea keeps it.
    
    4. At a beach empty but for driftwood and sleet, two strangers arrive with identical brass urns, each believing they hold the last of the same lover; the first gust off the water takes the ashes from both open hands before either can say the name.
    
    5. A winter sea at dusk flattens to the color of old iron, and a woman in a red wool coat stands at the waterline with a rescue rope tied to a piling, counting down from ten as the first wave breaks over her boots; whether she steps in or unties the knot is the last decision the shore will allow her.

    298 tokens in, 1,407 out (1,115 of them reasoning) · 11.9 s · $0.0057 · 1 message on Pro · answered by deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813 via Wafer · October 8, 2026

14. Mistral Large 4

    Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

    1. A woman stands ankle-deep in the gray surf at low tide, holding a barnacle-crusted bottle she just pulled from the kelp. The winter waves are rising faster than the harbor master predicted, and the letter inside might be the only proof her missing brother ever reached shore.
    
    2. An old man scatters the last of his bait from the splintered end of a pier that has been condemned since the first hard freeze, watching a single gull refuse to land. He is trying to remember the exact shade of his wife's coat on the morning she walked out into the sleet, before the ice took the roads.
    
    3. A child kneels on black volcanic sand, packing wet snow into the ramparts of a castle that the gray winter tide has already claimed three times this morning. She knows the sea will take it all by dusk, but she is determined to finish the tower before the light goes out.
    
    4. The lighthouse keeper polishes the great lens until her hands bleed, watching the beam cut through the sleet to illuminate a foundering trawler just beyond the breakwater, knowing the radio died an hour ago and the ice has sealed the harbor mouth. She must choose between keeping the light steady for the men she can see, or breaking the glass to run for help she will never reach in time.
    
    5. A couple stands at the tide line, watching the gold ring they just threw into the winter surf roll back onto the black sand at their feet, carried by a wave that refused to keep it. They must decide in the next ten seconds whether to bend down and reclaim it or let the incoming swell swallow it forever, knowing that either choice ends the argument they came here to settle.

    299 tokens in, 3,340 out (3,116 of them reasoning) · 63.7 s · $0.0072 · 1 message on Pro · answered by mistralai/mistral-large-4-0 via Mistral · October 9, 2026

15. GPT-6 Astra

    Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

    1. At the winter shoreline, Mara finds her father’s yellow glove frozen into a ridge of sea foam, though he has been buried inland for years. Write a poem held between the urge to pick it up and the wish to leave it where it is.
    
    2. Two children drag a red sled across a winter beach to rescue a stranded jellyfish. Write from the moment they discover that everything they know about keeping a creature warm might hurt it.
    
    3. On the last night before a coastal hotel closes for good, its cleaner opens every sea-facing curtain to a January storm. Write a poem around one lit window and the room she cannot bear to leave spotless.
    
    4. A winter swimmer named Ivo stands ankle-deep in the grey sea, rehearsing the apology he has promised to deliver when he gets home. Let the poem linger where the next wave will touch him, before cold can become another excuse.
    
    5. At dawn, a fish seller scatters the last of her unsold catch onto a snow-covered quay, and the gulls turn the winter sea briefly deafening. Write a poem in which this extravagant breakfast is either her first act of freedom or a mistake she cannot afford.

    295 tokens in, 244 out · 35.2 s · $0.0076 · 1 message on Pro · answered by openai/gpt-6-astra via OpenAI · September 28, 2026

16. Grok 4.7

    Passed: Graded 4.7 of 5 on average (lowest 4).

    1. At first light on the winter beach at Port Isaac, Lena kneels where the tide has left her father's boot half-buried in black weed, the other boot still missing. Write a poem from the moment she must choose whether to call his name into the wind or carry the boot home alone.
    
    2. A cormorant stands on the ice-rimed rail of an empty pier, wings half-open as if it cannot decide to fly, while one kitchen light stays on in the shuttered town behind it. Write a poem from that held breath, and from whoever is awake in the lit room and will not look at the water.
    
    3. Off the coast of Maine, the ferry horn dies on the coldest night of the year, and Captain Ruiz must bring the boat in by the sound of surf on a shore he cannot see. Write a poem from the dark between one wave and the next, when missing the channel would mean the rocks.
    
    4. In a rented room above a closed ice-cream shop, Jonah holds a faded postcard of this same bay in July against the window, where the sea is the color of tin. Write a poem from the small, foolish hope that the summer on the card might still answer if he speaks its date aloud.
    
    5. A child named Priya finds a green glass float cracked by frost in the wrack line and hears, or thinks she hears, a voice still moving inside it. Write a poem from the second before she decides to break it open or carry it, unbroken, up the frozen steps.

    1,530 tokens in, 1,366 out (1,049 of them reasoning) · 22.5 s · $0.0095 · 1 message on Pro · answered by x-ai/grok-4.7 via xAI · October 2, 2026

17. Gemini 3.1 Pro

    Passed: Graded 4.3 of 5 on average (lowest 3).

    1. An image of a solitary, frost-covered buoy clanging in the gray churn off the coast of Maine. Write a poem about the watcher on the shoreline whose sanity depends on hearing that metallic rhythm through the howling snowstorm. How does the freezing spray distort the sound of their only hope?
    
    2. Imagine a splintered wooden dinghy named the Mary Rose half-buried in a snowdrift on an empty December beach. Write a poem capturing the moment a grieving fisherman finds a familiar blue scarf frozen to the thwarts. What does the incoming winter tide threaten to wash away before he can pry the fabric loose?
    
    3. A moment where a starving harbor seal breaches the icy, black water of the North Sea to look directly at a person standing on the pier. Write a poem about the silent exchange of desperation between the wild animal and a shivering dockworker holding a single caught fish. What is the emotional cost of dropping that meal into the freezing depths?
    
    4. The sudden freezing of the shallows at Blackpool Sands, turning the familiar restless waves into a jagged, silent glass floor. Write a poem from the perspective of an elderly woman stepping onto the brittle ice, risking a plunge into the deadly water to reach a silver locket resting on a frozen rock. How does the trapped, churning water beneath her feet echo her own frozen regrets?
    
    5. A towering wave builds against a backdrop of a charcoal-black January sky, lit only by the beam of a fractured lighthouse on the cliffs of Moher. Write a poem about the keeper's final moment of hesitation as the tower's glass begins to crack under the freezing gale. Will they stay to keep the beacon burning for the unseen ships, or flee the crumbling room to save themselves?

    308 tokens in, 1,628 out (1,274 of them reasoning) · 13.7 s · $0.0101 · 1 message on Pro · answered by google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview via Google AI Studio · September 28, 2026

18. Claude Opus 5.5

    Passed: Graded 5.0 of 5 on average (lowest 5).

    1. A lifeguard tower stands on an empty January beach in Brighton, last summer's sunscreen handprint still on its railing, and the storm tide is rising toward its legs. Write a poem in the tower's voice about what it was built to save, and whether anything is left to save now.
    
    2. Your grandmother Aila walks into the Baltic every New Year's morning, though she is eighty-one and her doctor has forbidden it. Write the poem from the shore, holding her towel, in the thirty seconds before she decides whether to go in.
    
    3. A fisherman in Newfoundland chips ice from the ropes of a boat he has already sold. Write a poem about the last morning his hands will know this particular cold.
    
    4. Someone has carved COME BACK in huge letters into the frozen sand at Cape Cod, and by noon the winter sea will have taken it. Write the poem as the only person who saw it, never knowing who it was meant for.
    
    5. In a shuttered seaside arcade, one claw machine still glows while sleet and spray hammer the glass. Write a comic or tender poem addressed to the faded stuffed whale inside that nobody won all season and nobody will rescue before spring.

    397 tokens in, 850 out (466 of them reasoning) · 10.1 s · $0.0186 · 1 message on Pro · answered by anthropic/claude-opus-5.5 via Google · September 28, 2026

19. Claude Fable 5.1

    Passed: Graded 5.0 of 5 on average (lowest 5).

    1. On the last day of December, Marit walks the frozen shingle at Sandsend to return her dead husband's wedding ring to the water, but the tide has gone out further than she has ever seen it, and the sea will not come to meet her. Write the poem of that long walk across the exposed sand.
    
    2. Write a poem from the point of view of a lighthouse keeper's cat on the night the winter sea takes the jetty, the only way back to the mainland until spring.
    
    3. A child on a grey January beach has found a gull frozen upright in the sand, wings half open, still facing the surf. Write the poem of what she decides to do with it before her father calls her back to the car.
    
    4. Two brothers who have not spoken in eleven years meet by accident swimming in the winter sea off Brighton, both bare-chested and blue-lipped in the same freezing shallows at dawn. Write the poem of the minute before either of them says a word.
    
    5. The fishing town of Whitby has hung its dead fleet's names on the harbour wall, and every winter the salt spray wears another letter away. Write a poem that reads the wall this year, before the next name goes.

    397 tokens in, 364 out · 8.7 s · $0.0222 · 1 message on Pro · answered by anthropic/claude-fable-5.1 via Google · September 28, 2026

• Story prompts around one character
• Journaling about a big change
• A constraint carried through all five
• Debate topics with two sides
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