Claude Fable 5.1 made me a nice animated pelican(simonwillison.net)
54 pointsby elsewhen4 hours ago6 comments
  • chrononaut3 hours ago
    > The wheels in the video are rotating in the wrong direction

    I thought they were going in the correct direction until you mentioned that. Perhaps you / it created an unintended bistable illusion :)

  • emmelaich3 hours ago
    Are the wheels rotating in the wrong direction? I stared at it they seemed to reverse. Perhaps a bit of a optical illusion.

    Looking at the SVG, the direction is missing but the default is clockwise. So I'd say it's good!

  • andai3 hours ago
    That's pretty nice. Here's Gemini 3.7 for reference:

    https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/13/llm-gemini/

    I found Gemini's one much more impressive initially, but on closer inspection it's got a whole bunch of issues. Missing leg, objects overlapping etc.

    (We might say the seat looks "uncomfortable" xD)

    • mc323 hours ago
      It’s a bit like a naive “writing”/drawing of ideographic characters by someone who never wrote them. Things (lines and shapes) are there but just not quite right.
  • 0dayz3 hours ago
    Even if it is training on the Pelican bike test by now it's impressive and most importantly helps (at least I hope) svg animations and creations as those are pia to do.
  • catlifeonmars4 hours ago
    How do you determine the “best” pelican? I couldn’t see much of a difference between extra high and max.
    • simonw3 hours ago
      To me, the biggest difference is the beak: I like the max one much more than the xhigh one.

      Max also made a nicer background.

    • setr3 hours ago
      Ignoring aesthetics, there’s simply significantly more detail produced by max
      • jerf3 hours ago
        And it's correct detail. Earlier models had things like detached hats, or lighthouses floating above or below the level they should be at, etc. Everything is where it should be, the fish is clearly in the basket and not clipping through it, the animation has cartoon-correct parallax which is fairly impressive. By "cartoon-correct" I mean that if that was a real photo with real physics, that would be way too much motion for the boat and clouds, but for a cartoon, that is completely acceptable.
        • simonw3 hours ago
          The animation isn't down to max though - I took the SVG created by max and piped it back into high and asked that to animate it.
          • jerf2 hours ago
            Thank you for the clarification. I'm just impressed by the whole thing in general.
    • magarnicle3 hours ago
      It didn't get real wings until the Extra High version.
  • CamperBob22 hours ago
    Generated by GLM 5.3 NVFP4 (https://huggingface.co/local-inference-lab/GLM-5.3-NVFP4) in 6 minutes, running locally on 4x RTX6000: https://crimson-jeri-74.tiiny.site/

    So, who trained on who?