THE 15-MINUTE AI STRESS TEST EVERY DESIGNER CAN RUN

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

The Spaghetti Table Protocol tests whether multimodal AI systems apply physical grounding when generating images, using a prompt for an impossible dining table with dry spaghetti legs, a concrete slab top, and a water-filled fishbowl. Testing GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in February–March produced an aggregate score of 4/30, with Claude notably flagging the physical impossibility in words while still rendering it anyway. The author invites designers to run the same two-prompt test themselves and contribute results to a shared public dataset mapping where current AI architectures lack physical grounding.