Passing Rotated Images to Claude or ChatGPT Drops Accuracy to One-Third

"I Can't Read This" - When Claude Refuses Your Screenshot These days, throwing error screenshots at Claude or Codex for debugging is pretty standard practice. Your terminal output is trapped in an environment where you can't copy-paste, so you screenshot it and ask the AI, "What's going on here?" We all do it. But what if the screenshot is slightly rotated, and the AI's response becomes completely useless? Photos of monitors taken on phones. Whiteboard diagrams captured on iPads. Images end up in all sorts of orientations. You might assume, "It's AI, surely it can handle a little rotation." But for VLMs (Vision Language Models), image orientation is far more critical than you'd think. Here's a good way to think about it: VLMs have great eyesight but a stiff neck. They can read a properly oriented image flawlessly, but hand them an upside-down image and their reading comprehension drops to kindergarten level. How far does it drop exactly? We ran the experiment to find out. Experiment De