Draw a Silhouette of a Spider Missing Its Front Left Leg

It's June of 2025, and I wanted to create a quick mockup of a cover for a novel I'm working on. I wanted to have the silhouette of a spider with a missing leg at the center of my cover.[1] Should be easy, right? "LLM, conjure me one silhouette of a spider missing a leg."

"Totally a silhouette of a 7-legged spider..."

That spider has 9 legs. I want the spider to have 7 legs but preserve its silhouette

"7 legs, just as requested!"

I was curious, so I tried similar prompts with a few different tools: Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and Flux Context. All of them failed in similar ways, either giving me 9- or 8-legged spiders.

I didn't approach this very scientifically or try very hard. It's easy enough to remove one of the legs with another tool, and my goal was simply to create a mockup in Canva. I'm sure it's possible to get one of these tools to generate a spider silhouette missing one of its legs; it's just striking that it requires effort, and that the tools still seem incapable of telling that the images that they're generating don't have the right number of legs.

Maybe this is totally expected! I haven't been paying much attention to the current state of image generation, and I don't know enough to know if I'm even using models that should be good at this sort of task.

Anyways, here are a few more pictures of spider "silhouettes" that totally all have exactly 7 legs.

Stable Diffusion

"This is picture of an 9-legged spider when viewed from above. It is not a silhouette, and it has the suggestion of an additional leg on its right side." Aside from the extra leg on the right side of the image, there's something odd going on the left side. Plus, it's definitely not a silhouette.

Flux Context

"Green and gold spider silhouette with 8 legs. It also has at least one set of extra pedipalps."

Where did the extra pedipalps come from? At least they're symmetrical.

gpt-image-1

"Black and white silhouette of an 8-legged spider." At least it looks like the silhouette of a spider?


  1. According to Wikipedia (citing the New Zealand Journal of Zoology), "Portia's palps and legs break off very easily, which may be a defense mechanism, and Portias are often seen with missing legs or palps." ↩︎