Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs

Current evaluations do not isolate whether text-only language models can originate visual concepts before image generation. Fluent visual prose can hide visual-plan failures: an answer may appear creative while repeating familiar visual clichés or failing to specify a renderable scene. We define Visual Creative Ideation (VCI) as the ability to produce textual visual plans that are useful, expressive, and population-novel, and introduce Ekphrasis, a 400-task benchmark spanning Abstraction, Combination, Transformation, and Adaptation. Ekphrasis scores anonymized pairwise comparisons with dimension-specific checklists, aggregates preferences with Bradley-Terry models, and uses Typed Idea Graphs to convert task-specific population clichés into novelty references. Across 14 language models, VCI separates usefulness, expressiveness, and novelty rather than reducing to fluency: strong models achieve similar overall scores through different profiles, and useful plans can remain visually clichéd. A cross-modal grounding study further shows that text-level VCI ordering largely survives faithful rendering and blind image-level preference judgment, supporting Ekphrasis as a measure of visual ideation beyond prose quality.