The splotchiness on that simple chess animation makes this GIF feature a nonstarter.

Yeahhhh but that’s like saying Dall-E isn’t good enough

Ain’t wrong buuuuut…

That's a bit hyperbolic. The windmill one is honestly not terrible (slight flicker on the door).

Honestly, you have to think about the use case. GIFs are going to be little throwaway things that you're pasting into Discord or meme-ing.

Nobody's reaching for a GIF if they're looking for professional results.

Everyone is highly sensitive to slop, and it still looks like slop.

If you actually want something that looks decent, it feels like tool use would at least help cover the obvious blunders. Building layers to composite would go a long way to removing some slop here.

The windmill's axis shifts clearly and doesn't rotate at a uniform speed throughout the animation.

It's substantially worse than than an animated SVG of the same thing, and I don't think anyone can pretend otherwise.

Slight flicker on the door? The axle jumps to the right.

Right - the results seems to be inconsistent (it did a much better job with the eagle). Unsurprising IMHO given that you're essentially asking for a zero-shot of up to 16 coherent frames.

Yeah, what's up with those splotches? Are those watermarks? I am sure they weren't there a few months ago.

I've noticed it's worse when repeatedly generating against output. Ex. in the ChatGPT app, I'll ask the agent to use the original source image for refinements (if modifying a non-generated image) rather than just prompting for changes, otherwise the mottling gets bad.