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Increasingly I think I agree with Dase that R1 seems much closer to AGI, possibly at it, than previous models. Its prose is raw, but narratively and stylistically superior to other models. It is capable of genuinely great writing with complex prompts. I think it’s the first model that clearly outcompetes me in terms of verbal IQ. Eerie in a way, but hardly a surprise; if anything in early 2023 I assumed it would take even less time.
I've used almost every major LLM for the purposes of writing fiction or prose, and I would put R1 at about the same tier as Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Which is to say, very good. Too close to call in my opinion.
GPT-4o is better than GPT-4 in that regard, but it, like even Gemini 1206, lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. I don't like reading fiction they've written, or feel satisfied when I ask them to expand on my own.
Sonnet is pretty good, R1 is better though. On its own it is a worse writer, but as a tool capable of copying someone’s style it’s better. It’s also (as Count said before his recent re-banning) very funny, and capable of coming up with very niche subculture jokes after searching Google. I’ll try it on The Motte but I actually think it might find the humor in the Hock, Leviathan Shaped Hole etc.
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Are you sure that you're not selling yourself short? My very brief interaction with R1 (just now, on opernouter.ai) shows that, while verbally skilled, it still has that noticeable AI-ism where it makes everything sound like a high school essay written by a teacher's pet, and if you try to prompt it to not act that way, it tries not to but it still deep down sounds that way. Can you suggest how to prompt it to seem more interesting?
It's certainly very impressive if it runs much more cheaply than ChatGPT, but so far I haven't seen a reason to think that it's actually more interesting to interact with than ChatGPT is.
Or should I try to run it somewhere other than openrouter.ai?
I find that asking it to specifically emulate the style of a human author works well. Who that author is, is up to you, but I usually try Peter Watts or Ian Banks for starters as they have very distinctive voices.
I would say I have a very distinct voice in my fiction. There's nobody else quite like it. Just today, I was thinking about taking a web serial of mine off hiatus, and had gotten through most of a chapter before I felt less than happy with the overall flow of a few paragraphs and the overarching structure of the entire chapter, and was too tired to think of better options.
I fed the entire thing into R1, told it I was unhappy with a few bits, and asked it to try to rewrite the last few paragraphs, in my style, while maintaining the quality of the strong start. It did wonders. I found myself nodding my head and thinking yep, that's how I write, and that would be an example of what I consider good writing from myself. Except it wasn't me doing more than hinting.
For the record, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is just as good (or so close I can't call it), and I ended up doing a final edit while taking inspiration from both.
You might get some mileage out of asking it to emulate Yudkowsky, Gwern or even Scott.
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