Is it me or is there maybe some carryover happening where the pelicans are portrayed as expending different degrees of effort too? Like, the high effort pelican has a determined look on his face.

Is the prompt context telling the models what their effort level is, and the ambient presence of that concept of ‘high effort’ in the context window is leaking through and affecting the portrayal?

I don't know if this is how the OpenAI effort levels work, but for Qwen 3.8 27B the effort level really does get translated into the prompt.

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B/blob/main/chat_templ...

xhigh: "Reasoning effort is set to xhigh. Please think carefully through the task, validate key assumptions, consider plausible alternatives, and prioritize correctness, consistency, and clarity in the final answer."

low: "Reasoning effort is set to low. Keep your thinking brief and focused, moving directly to the conclusion without unnecessary elaboration."