You can get semi-decent sprite work out of GenAI models, but you still have to put in some manual work (scale normalization, palette reduction, grid alignments, etc). It's definitely not "out-of-the-box" yet.

https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation

Shameless plug, but I built an image generation app with tools for sprite sheet and cutting out the sprites automatically.

Added support for GPT 2.5

http://batchbanana.com/

It's better to use a specialized model for that https://retrodiffusion.ai

>"Still can't make sprite sheets :("

The key is making them one frame at a time, rather than asking for the whole sheet. Adherence frame-to-frame with a reference image is really good, so just prompt with the previous + direction. I finally got Nano Banana to make fairly decent fluid animations that way.

No but it can write a tool that can.

Interesting. I'm surprised they haven't prioritised/deliberately trained for this more because of how useful it is to ask codex to generate some images/assets/sprites when building sill games. It would dramatically enhance how polished it's games were.

That said for single images the old model was already okayish for prototypes