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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.
I do program, and 4.8 is definitely a better programmer than 4.6, but yes non-programming capabilities in general seem to have degrated. Apropos of the same, GLM-5.2 (open weights!) just released and it's literally 2nd on the arena.ai coding leaderboard, above Opus 4.8 even, but is nowhere to be seen on the creative writing or document benchmarks. Companies are correctly focusing on making the best coding models because it's commerically useful in a way that being able to spit out Harry/Snape fanfics at speed isn't.
Writing is too subjective and has in any case been better than the average native English speaker since GPT-3, probably 2. It is not going to write Ulysses (yet), but there isn’t much at that quality in the training set and almost nobody would appreciate it if it could. 99.9% of writing in the English language is covered by models that have been available for years. It may be generic, but compared to the writing ability of the average member of the public it’s good enough to write a restaurant menu, an email to a colleague, a press release, a Facebook marketplace ad, a high school essay. We may lament the sad end of the amusing broken English of earlier years, but few will miss it.
Ulysses is almost the worst possible comparison to use here, as I suspect the mental process that produced it is not dissimilar to an LLM with its temperature set too high. Sure, some people claim it's a masterwork of literature, but whether this reflects some true ineffable artistic vision or not, I doubt I could tell the difference between one of its pages and some random junk spit out by an LLM that's past its context window.
More relevant to me is that LLMs are not going to produce the next Dungeon Crawler Carl anytime soon. And that's a shame!
Disagree there. I like Dungeon Crawler Carl for what it is–very entertaining pop culture trash, which I say lovingly. It is reminiscent of the old pulps (love me some Howard and Lovecraft, but elegant wordsmiths or deep miners of the human condition, they were not). But DCC is exactly the kind of story an LLM can or soon will be able to churn out– some metaplot and a bunch of recurring characters distinct enough to kind of care when they die, plowing through absurd bullshit choose-your-own-adventure scenarios and RNG-table boss battles rife with gross-out humor. There is no genius there except in the marketing and not much originality. I'd say Dinniman is a moderately better writer than the vast majority of writers on RoyalRoad or any LLM, but most of the former could already be replaced by the latter.
Can't comment on Ulysses as I haven't read it, but what else I have read of James Joyce was not particularly to my taste but clearly the product of a human mind that is not (yet) replicable by an LLM.
I've got to disagree. Have you read any more recent stuff on RoyalRoad? For whatever reason, AI writing has exploded on there in the past couple months, and it's very easy to tell which authors are using it (even when they say they aren't). And not in a good way. I wish I could just get an LLM to pump out pulp to my specifications, but if anything I think the newest models have regressed on prose, and they were never even mediocre.
The problem -- and it's been the problem since R1 -- is repetitive structure and cliche. Most of these aren't awful, per se, the issue is that instead of getting one per thousand words -- already enough to get on my nerves -- the model will stuff three of them into a paragraph. Into every paragraph. It's unreadable.
Most of the authors on RoyalRoad aren't very good, that's for sure, but they know that and their prose is appropriately simple and unambitious as a result; it doesn't call attention to itself. LLM writing is probably better on a technical level, but it's nowhere near as good as it (seems to) think it is, so it refuses to get out of its own way.
(This might be a prompting or process issue? I can't be certain other authors with better techniques aren't just slipping under my radar. If someone thinks they have an example of actually good AI writing, I'm willing to give it a shot and change my mind if I agree. Like I said, I really wish this worked.)
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