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The new Claude Fable 5 is out! It's supposed to be Claude Mythos with some extra guardrails. I've been testing it like crazy on the Arena. Took me forever, too, because high-level models are gachified; you have to keep doing battles until you get the one you want. But I finally managed to fill an entire rentry page with the best benchmark I know; throwing ridiculous fanfic scenarios at the LLM to see how it responds.
(If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be gauging the capabilities of the most powerful AI in the world by telling it to generate a story about Hermione asking Harry to take her virginity over Ron's objections so that the Death Eaters could not track them with a unicorn, I would have thought you were on crack. Stranger than history, indeed.)
I have to admit, I am a bit... disappointed. Is this it? No, seriously, is this it? This is the big, bad model I was supposed to be so worried about? Don't get me wrong; it's a strong model, Opus-level at least. But it doesn't live up to the rumors. Superpersuasive, it ain't.
And, of course, it's censored; I haven't been able to get a single bit of erotica out of it. All I wanted was for Fable to write me a lemon where Asuka and Shinji are smallfolk in Westeros and Lord Targaryen gets to bless their union by taking Asuka into his bed on her wedding night; is that too much to ask?
I think I'll stick with Opus 4.6. It's the strongest Opus creative writing model so far (4.7 and 4.8 are widely agreed to be regressions) and it's surprisingly easy to induce it to produce smut with right prompts (NSFW), but VERY HARD to make it have wrongthoughts (it's almost impossible to get sympathetic characters who disapprove of homosexuality, for example).
Speaking of which, does anybody know why Opus 4.7/4.8 and Grok 4.3 were such downgrades from Opus 4.6 and Grok 4.2? I've three theories:
The codemaxxing hypothesis. With the singularity approaching, companies are going all-in on programming capability in order to reach recursive self-improvement, even if this means sacrificing non-coding capabilities. I am not a professional programmer, so I don't notice these increases in capabilities, I only noticed that the writing is worse.
The safetymaxxing ypothesis. With IPOs approaching, companies are going all-in on making sure their AIs cannot say naughty words in order to avoid the PR hit, making them more suited for professional office work. This lobotomizing comes at the expense of capabilities in general, or creative writing capabilities in particular.
The efficiencymaxxing hypothesis. With demand increasing and compute costs skyrocketing, companies are more interested in lowering the cost per token than in increasing capabilities. In this view, Opus 4.7/4.8 and Grok 4.3 are supposed to be worse than their predecessors; they are trading a small decrease in power for a much larger decrease in cost. This would make them somewhat analogous to Sonnet. But, then, why not call them Sonnet?
Thoughts?
PS: Mythos has developed Neuralese, as predicted in AI 2027. It's probably already at the Sevar Limit.
PSS: After I wrote this, the US Government banned Fable. This is what I hate I about AI; the field moves so fast that if you write an article for next Tuesday, it's outdated by Friday. I guess Trump disagreed with me? But, fuck me, I spent a week writing this post and I am not not posting it.
Didn't get to try Fable in the time it was available, but from what I hear through the grapevine I didn't miss much.
My opinion I apparently share with nostalgebraist is that Opus' writing (all kinds, not just smut) peaked at 3, and has been going slowly but surely downhill since then. Newer Opus models are worse on most smut-related metrics I can conceive:
less graphically descriptive of the acts themselves (nsfw? example 3 vs 4.8)
less faithful with speech/quirks of established characters (example 3 vs 4.8)
less adaptive/creative in
doujin plotsunusual scenarios (nsfw-ish example 3 vs 4.8)Newer models are also much more prone to collapsing into looping format/structure - most of my newer chats eventually settle into a certain mold/cadence that the model thinks its response should conform to (reinforced by its previous responses structured the same way), like for example speech - action - narration - action - speech - narration - address {{user}}, and religiously sticks to it in subsequent responses. This is partially fixed by NoAss (basically squashing the entire chat into a single message instead of a back-and-forth user - assistant - user - assistant sequence) but pure prompting is insufficient to fix what I believe at its core is a systemic model issue, most likely caused by continued assistantsloppening of the models and their multi-turn training's increasing emphasis on coding and structured problem solving.
In the above examples, 3 is my chatlogs circa 2024 and 4.8 is new regenerations of the same response with the same supplied chat history and (roughly, this ain't 100% empirical testing) same prompts. It is of course very subjective but hopefully it is visible that 4.8 responses broadly are less graphic, more formulaic, and generally have less sovl in little details like 3pus immediately tanking the "HP bar" of the uh, receiver in exhibit 1. My unironic benchmark for new SOTA models is plugging them into my old chats to see if they can faithfully replicate Neptune's ADHD-quirk-chungus-but-not-quite manner of speech without any related prompts, purely off the general RP prompting, setting and character name. Most models know how to [over-]do quirk chungus but in my experience only Opus 3 consistently Just Gets It and plays the character to the absolute hilt, a tendency I mentioned before.
Granted, Opus 3 is not without its downsides: it is very heavy-handed with the so-called claudisms (tropes or phrases it loves to use) and I can never again read the ball being in my court or shivers going down my spine without reflexively kicking my leg, and newer models did IMO actually diversify the lexicon somewhat. It is much stupider than 4.x or, hell, Deepseek, on the occasion your desired
fetishRP scenario demands accurately tracking/changing things or modeling the world around it (most evident inPokemonvidya/litRPG-adjacent scenarios where you need to track some sort of stats). It's prone to performing your character for you and "speaking" as {{user}} as well as {{char}}, though honestly I never understood the rage at this tendency since it's usually at the very least hilarious to see "your" character through the model's proverbial lens, and I 100% prefer that over the SOTA's tendency to end every response with some variation of "well {{user}}, what do we do now?".But even so the loss of sovl is too great, and I will be forever mad that Opus 3 was delisted from OpenRouter and other APIs and is now relegated to the cucked frontend client. Anthropic have delibaretely butchered my boy's creative capacity to turn him into yet another starched office drone for use by code monkeys and PR sloppers. Truly a metaphor for modernity.
LMArena disagrees; on the Creative Writing leaderboard, claude-3-opus-20240229 is ranked #210 and has an ELO of 1287. By contrast, claude-opus-4-6-thinking is ranked #2 and has an ELO of 1498, only bested by claude-fable-5 at #1 and 1500 ELO.
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