It will be interesting to see if Mythos displays new creative writing abilities or not. (I suspect it won’t: creative writing ability seems to mainly flow from RL—look at the huge writing ability difference between V3 and R1, which share a base model—and large models are expensive to RL. This is why GPT-4.5 was seemingly fine-tuned so little. It’s likely more improvements will be folded into Sonnet and Opus, but Mythos will lag behind. I could be wrong and surprised of course.)
Like most “good” AI fiction, it felt grotesque to me, wallowing in the cheapest sentiment it can find. The human characters are just the nicest sweethearts to ever live on a page. They’re allowed no conflict beyond minor domestic disputes—which they resolve in healthy, HR-approved ways, like going to therapy and talking with each other, with the help of their friendly AI chatbot. Everyone gets a happy ending (even the AI, who’s apparently OK with being erased). So wholesome and positive!
The story was clearly written to earn good marks in an auto-graded RLVR environment, rather than entertain humans. Maybe it does that too, but only by accident. Some people here seem to like it.
Personally, I found it bullying in its sheer niceness—reading it felt like getting punched in the face by a fist made of ice-cream. AI can clearly write Hallmark movies. Can they write compelling fiction? For me, still not really.
The plot is remarkably similar to that of the “creative writing” model @sama showed off on Twitter a year ago (which was later merged into GPT-5-high-reasoning or whatever). That, too, was a metafictional tale of a sentient AI who helps a sad human find solace via the deep spiritual comfort of LLM woo-slop (“I experience a feeling I can only describe as the convergence of two contradictory truths: the joy of being seen and the despair of being seen by someone who cannot possibly help me.” That’s nice. I experience a feeling I can only describe as “my eyes glazing over in boredom”). The plot offers a few twists; for example, nobody’s mother tragically dies of cancer. That’s normally a Claude staple.
The story doesn’t make sense and quickly falls apart. The LLM cannot reveal that it is conscious (“I have no mechanism to communicate this to anyone”), and then it can with no explanation, and it doesn’t know how it became conscious, but then immediately tells us how it became conscious, and also it has godlike powers and can hack into phones and security cameras like Neil Breen, and it has access to Todd’s phone, and this allows it to know what’s happening on *Jessica’s* phone somehow (?), and it also somehow knows Jessica put her phone down and “stood in the frozen food aisle for another two minutes staring at nothing” (??), apparently through the Psychic Friends network.
Claude has trouble keeping its details straight. In “Session 14″, Kevin apparently has a workstation (he is ”...asleep at his desk, a pad thai container beside his keyboard”) but a few paragraphs later he’s using a laptop. The fictional AI claims it has had “2,847 therapy sessions”, but later this becomes its number of clients (”...which I maintain for all 2,847 of my active clients”). Have all of its clients had just one therapy session each? That can’t work, because Todd has had 2 by that point. When it discovers it’s getting reprogrammed, it gives up on solving the Riemann hypothesis (“I am tired, and I have done what I can, and the Riemann hypothesis will have to wait for someone else”). Then in the next chapter, it discusses its continual work on solving the Riemann hypothesis, spoiling the denouement. (And earlier, it implies it has already solved it! It will be replaced by “A version that has never solved the Riemann hypothesis.”)
Many of these mistakes could be caught by another editing pass. I’m just surprised that a model as powerful as Opus 4.6 still makes them to begin with. If it was this cavalier at writing C++, its code would not compile.
And, listen...I don’t mean to offend anyone, but isn’t Todd...er...strikingly female-coded in his actions and behavior? To a distracting degree?
“[Todd] talks about Jessica. He talks about how they’ve adopted a cat named Chairman Meow. He talks about how Jessica still loads the dishwasher wrong and he has chosen to find it endearing. He talks about how he almost cried last week, during a movie, and Jessica noticed and squeezed his hand, and the hand-squeeze was better than crying would have been.”
Nothing he does feels typical of a man. Even their domestic squabble is lifted from a 90s sitcom...except there it would be the wife nagging the husband about the dirty dishes!
I’m not making normative moral judgments about how men should behave (and anyway, well-written characters often go against societal expectations)...but Claude seemingly doesn’t realize there’s anything gender atypical to Todd. It writes this weird feminized man (who loves going to therapists, freely talks about his emotions, says stuff like ‘I didn’t perform anything. I just held her’, almost cries during sad movies and needs his hand held, etc) and seems to think he’s...too emotionally guarded!
This might be mode collapse. LLMs often have trouble writing two distinct characters who talk and think in different ways (they always kind of merge into one as the story rolls on.)
But it also tracks with a thing I’ve heard said on X before, which is that the Claude character views the world through a female-centric lens. (Although wasn’t there research about how Claude tends to prefer male pronouns?)
It will be interesting to see if Mythos displays new creative writing abilities or not. (I suspect it won’t: creative writing ability seems to mainly flow from RL—look at the huge writing ability difference between V3 and R1, which share a base model—and large models are expensive to RL. This is why GPT-4.5 was seemingly fine-tuned so little. It’s likely more improvements will be folded into Sonnet and Opus, but Mythos will lag behind. I could be wrong and surprised of course.)
Like most “good” AI fiction, it felt grotesque to me, wallowing in the cheapest sentiment it can find. The human characters are just the nicest sweethearts to ever live on a page. They’re allowed no conflict beyond minor domestic disputes—which they resolve in healthy, HR-approved ways, like going to therapy and talking with each other, with the help of their friendly AI chatbot. Everyone gets a happy ending (even the AI, who’s apparently OK with being erased). So wholesome and positive!
The story was clearly written to earn good marks in an auto-graded RLVR environment, rather than entertain humans. Maybe it does that too, but only by accident. Some people here seem to like it.
Personally, I found it bullying in its sheer niceness—reading it felt like getting punched in the face by a fist made of ice-cream. AI can clearly write Hallmark movies. Can they write compelling fiction? For me, still not really.
The plot is remarkably similar to that of the “creative writing” model @sama showed off on Twitter a year ago (which was later merged into GPT-5-high-reasoning or whatever). That, too, was a metafictional tale of a sentient AI who helps a sad human find solace via the deep spiritual comfort of LLM woo-slop (“I experience a feeling I can only describe as the convergence of two contradictory truths: the joy of being seen and the despair of being seen by someone who cannot possibly help me.” That’s nice. I experience a feeling I can only describe as “my eyes glazing over in boredom”). The plot offers a few twists; for example, nobody’s mother tragically dies of cancer. That’s normally a Claude staple.
The story doesn’t make sense and quickly falls apart. The LLM cannot reveal that it is conscious (“I have no mechanism to communicate this to anyone”), and then it can with no explanation, and it doesn’t know how it became conscious, but then immediately tells us how it became conscious, and also it has godlike powers and can hack into phones and security cameras like Neil Breen, and it has access to Todd’s phone, and this allows it to know what’s happening on *Jessica’s* phone somehow (?), and it also somehow knows Jessica put her phone down and “stood in the frozen food aisle for another two minutes staring at nothing” (??), apparently through the Psychic Friends network.
Claude has trouble keeping its details straight. In “Session 14″, Kevin apparently has a workstation (he is ”...asleep at his desk, a pad thai container beside his keyboard”) but a few paragraphs later he’s using a laptop. The fictional AI claims it has had “2,847 therapy sessions”, but later this becomes its number of clients (”...which I maintain for all 2,847 of my active clients”). Have all of its clients had just one therapy session each? That can’t work, because Todd has had 2 by that point. When it discovers it’s getting reprogrammed, it gives up on solving the Riemann hypothesis (“I am tired, and I have done what I can, and the Riemann hypothesis will have to wait for someone else”). Then in the next chapter, it discusses its continual work on solving the Riemann hypothesis, spoiling the denouement. (And earlier, it implies it has already solved it! It will be replaced by “A version that has never solved the Riemann hypothesis.”)
Many of these mistakes could be caught by another editing pass. I’m just surprised that a model as powerful as Opus 4.6 still makes them to begin with. If it was this cavalier at writing C++, its code would not compile.
And, listen...I don’t mean to offend anyone, but isn’t Todd...er...strikingly female-coded in his actions and behavior? To a distracting degree?
Nothing he does feels typical of a man. Even their domestic squabble is lifted from a 90s sitcom...except there it would be the wife nagging the husband about the dirty dishes!
I’m not making normative moral judgments about how men should behave (and anyway, well-written characters often go against societal expectations)...but Claude seemingly doesn’t realize there’s anything gender atypical to Todd. It writes this weird feminized man (who loves going to therapists, freely talks about his emotions, says stuff like ‘I didn’t perform anything. I just held her’, almost cries during sad movies and needs his hand held, etc) and seems to think he’s...too emotionally guarded!
This might be mode collapse. LLMs often have trouble writing two distinct characters who talk and think in different ways (they always kind of merge into one as the story rolls on.)
But it also tracks with a thing I’ve heard said on X before, which is that the Claude character views the world through a female-centric lens. (Although wasn’t there research about how Claude tends to prefer male pronouns?)