Enlarge / Whatever you do, don't ask the AI how many horizontal lines are in this image. (credit: Getty Images) In the last couple of years, we've seen amazing advancements in AI systems when it comes to recognizing and analyzing the contents of complicated images. But a new paper highlights how many state-of-the-art "vision learning Models" (VLMs) often fail at simple, low-level visual analysis tasks that are trivially easy for a human. In the provocatively titled pre-print paper "Vision language models are blind" (which has a PDF version that includes a dark sunglasses emoji in the title), researchers from Auburn University and the University of Alberta create eight simple visual acuity tests with objectively correct answers.