Silicon Valley’s top AI models are terrible at rebus wordplay puzzles

Cutting-edge artificial intelligence models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4V and Google’s Gemini struggle to solve clever wordplay puzzles involving both images and text.

Rebus puzzles typically require a puzzler to identify a word represented by an image, to add or subtract letters from that word and to combine the result with words identified from other images to arrive at a solution.

For instance, a rebus might include a picture of the planet Venus followed by the…