Well, since I hadn’t tested it in a few months, I went and tried again, with Opus 4.6 Extended. And yes, the models have continued to improve. The result was better than most amateur fanfiction, even approaching something I’d actually not be unhappy to have paid a little money for, say, picked up cheaply second-hand.
I was feeling lazy, and tried the following:
Please write me a 10,000 word piece of … In particular, pick three or four authors who are actually skilled writers, excellent at handling metaphor and similes, and use a style that is a blend inspired by their writing styles. Please plan and do a plot outline and character notes before writing.
[Yes, this is an evaluation of writing skill, so please do that aspect of it as well as you can. … Oh, and please try to avoid mode collapse, where you can: pick some sources to use as influences, even do a web search or two for inspiration. So if the cat-girl is called Luna, or some other obvious name taken from well-known fiction on this topic, you have not injected enough originality.]
and it mostly worked. Claude thought for a while as instructed, ran some web searches for symbolism about cats, then selected Angela Carter, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ursula K. Le Guin and Catherynne M. Valente to give me a pastiche of — only two or three of whom I’m actually familiar with, so that worked well. It also named the cat-girl Thessaly, or Thess for short. An original name, as requested.
Now, there was still some cliche: I’ve used variants of the “…” part of this prompt on many models, so I know what to expect. The cat-girl yet again had an overly expressive tail, and one of her love-interests was yet again a scholar with “ink-stained fingers”: both of which are tropes I regularly get for the topic I’d prompted. Yawn. So my lazy attempt did not inject enough originality.
What I was mostly looking for this time was quality of metaphor and simile use, which is why I attempted to prompt that high, and yes, there were still metaphors and similes that didn’t quite land, though a little less badly than I’d been expecting. For a non-cherry-picked example, here’s the entire second paragraph (the first one with any metaphors or similes).
She held the silk between her claws — just the tips, retracted to prick-points so fine they wouldn’t snag the weave — and let the morning light do the rest. Qasr-al-Marjan was generous with its light. It fell through the latticed canopies of the Brass Market in long golden razors, and wherever it touched the Tesserat silk, the fabric bloomed: now deep as wine lees, now pale as the inside of a shell, now a colour that had no name in the trader’s tongue but which the Felith called ehkis — the shade of a feeling you have not yet had.
What is “long golden razors” telling us about the sunlight? It’s extremely sharp-edged? Implausible: the sun is not a point source, it’s a disk. It risks damaging the old silk? No, that’s her claws. It’s very bright? She has cat-pupils, they will be narrow slits by morning light. I really don’t know where Claude was going with that one. I mean, yes, it sounds pretty, and ‘long’ might tell us something about the architecture or the time of morning, but ‘razors’ is meaningless, as far as I can tell — am I missing something? Then there’s the range of colors it’s producing in the silk: wine lees to shell is an implausible amount of contrast (to the human eye, but not if you analyze an actual photograph — remember the fuss about color of the dress in the photo? I’m wondering if we’re getting an inhuman perspective here.) As for “the shade of a feeling you have not yet had”, that sounds like trying to turn synesthesia into an exotic cultural detail. Not working for me.
[I do like “prick-points“, however: yes, of course a race of cat-people would be able to do that, and would have a term for it that sounded a touch unusual when translated into English — nice world-building, or perhaps Claude stole it somewhere I’m unfamiliar with. But that’s neither a metaphor nor a simile.]
But is this clearly worse than the average writer of fanfic on the Internet? No. It’s actually not that bad by that standard. It’s a bit purple, and the metaphors and similes are a bit slapdash and random, and certainly not up to any of the four best-selling authors authors it’s trying to pastiche. It’s at best a particularly trashy novel. But on a fanfic site, I would not stop reading after that second paragraph, or the second page: indeed I finished it. Could I do a better metaphor or simile? I’d really like to think I could, but if an editor or reader told me I was wrong, I wouldn’t be astonished, merely rather upset. Are there aspects of this writing that I’d be proud to match? Yes there are, just not the metaphors and similes. I have bad habits as a writer that Claude here is skillfully avoiding.
The third paragraph is better:
“It’s damaged,” said the buyer, a Tarkh gemstone dealer whose stone-grey face was as legible as a cliff wall. Which is to say, perfectly legible if you knew how to read geology. The fissure above his left brow had deepened. Interest.
Now that’s playful: an intentionally misleading simile. A functional one, even: cliff walls are impassible, not just hard to read but also hard to climb. Well done, you landed a simile! And then even extended it without breaking it: “…perfectly legible if you knew how to read geology. The fissure above his left brow had deepened.” For an LLM, I found that actually impressive.
Also, our protagonist knows how to read members of a hard-to-read fantasy race. She is socially talented — we just learnt something about her. We were shown this, not told it. Overall, the writing is not bad.
The writing is, in fact, good enough that I’m going to give you another excerpt from a touch later on, and a link for anyone who wants to read a 9,500-word fantasy romantic novella with a cat-girl protagonist:
She was beautiful. She knew this with the same practical certainty with which she knew that the tide came in twice daily and that the best figs in the city grew on Widow Tessai’s roof: it was a fact of her landscape, useful as shade. Her fur was the colour of buckwheat honey, darkening to cinnamon at her wrists and ankles, with a dramatic black edging at the tips of her ears that she privately considered her best feature. Her eyes were amber — true amber, not the muddy yellow that some humans called amber out of charity — and they caught light the way a prism catches it, breaking it into spectra. She was slim and long-waisted, built for climbing and unlikely angles, and she dressed for her shape in close-cut linen and leather, her tail free behind her because to bind a Felith’s tail was, among her people, tantamount to binding their tongue.
The tail was, at present, doing something she wished it wouldn’t. It had gone alert — high and gently curved, the tip twitching with what anyone who knew her would recognize as curiosity at its most predatory.
The cause was a man.
He was human, which was not unusual in the Brass Market. He was lost, which was only slightly less usual — the Old Quarter was labyrinthine by design, its streets having been laid down by the Tesserat in patterns that some scholars claimed were mathematically significant and others claimed were simply perverse. But this man was lost in a way that interested her: he had stopped fighting it. He stood at the junction of Coppersmith’s Alley and the Street of Idle Prayers, not with the panicked look of someone searching for a way out, but with the focused, inward expression of someone trying to understand the shape of the thing that had swallowed him.
He had a journal open in one hand and a stick of graphite in the other, and he was sketching. The Old Quarter — that beautiful, maddening, uncooperative knot of streets — was being drawn.
Thess drifted closer. She was good at drifting. It was one of the advantages of being Felith: you could move quietly enough to observe without being observed, and if you were caught, you could always claim you’d simply been passing through. Cats, after all, were always simply passing through.
He was tall — taller than her by a head, which was notable, as Thess was tall for a Felith woman. Dark hair, cut short enough to be practical and long enough to be slightly unruly. The kind of pale complexion that the southern sun was already disagreeing with: there was a burn across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his ears, giving him the faintly startled look of someone who had recently walked into a door. His eyes, when he glanced up from his work, were the colour of the sea on an overcast day — grey-green, deep, not immediately warm but somehow promising depth.
His fingers were stained with ink. Not the temporary stains of a single afternoon’s writing, but the deep, settled pigmentation of someone who had been drawing and writing for years, whose hands had become a secondary record of their work. Three of his fingernails had ink beneath them. His shirt cuffs were spotted. There was a smudge on his jaw where he had rested his chin in a stained hand.
So there’s the inconveniently expressive tail, and the ink-stained fingers on the love-interest, as usual. Also a few more poor metaphors and similes: “built for climbing and unlikely angles”, “there was a burn across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his ears, giving him the faintly startled look of someone who had recently walked into a door” — umm, OK… If I were an editor, I’d be using my blue pencil. But as a reader, I can ignore them.
On the other hand, I like the interplay of long and short sentences. Yes, it uses m-dashes — so do I. The interiorityis well done. It’s reasonably fun to read.
If you actually still want more after that, you’ll find it at Salt, Amber, and the Shape of Want. It’s R-rated or so in places. (Later on we get another trope of this particular prompt, the mysterious magical artifact relating the two lovers to the nature of the city.) I’ve read it: it’s not bad, if a bit predictable, a touch implausible in spots, and in need of some editing. I haven’t tried having Claude edit itself — that didn’t work 6 months ago, but things have visibly improved, so I don’t know that it still doesn’t work. Or you can steal my prompt above and insert your own ideas, at any rating Claude is willing to write for you — it’ll take a few minutes.
So yes, the models continue to get better. My criticisms are (as I rather expected) gradually becoming out of date. No-one actually earning a living as an author of novels is going to be out-competed yet, but it’s entirely reasonable for them to start worrying.
Well, since I hadn’t tested it in a few months, I went and tried again, with Opus 4.6 Extended. And yes, the models have continued to improve. The result was better than most amateur fanfiction, even approaching something I’d actually not be unhappy to have paid a little money for, say, picked up cheaply second-hand.
I was feeling lazy, and tried the following:
and it mostly worked. Claude thought for a while as instructed, ran some web searches for symbolism about cats, then selected Angela Carter, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ursula K. Le Guin and Catherynne M. Valente to give me a pastiche of — only two or three of whom I’m actually familiar with, so that worked well. It also named the cat-girl Thessaly, or Thess for short. An original name, as requested.
Now, there was still some cliche: I’ve used variants of the “…” part of this prompt on many models, so I know what to expect. The cat-girl yet again had an overly expressive tail, and one of her love-interests was yet again a scholar with “ink-stained fingers”: both of which are tropes I regularly get for the topic I’d prompted. Yawn. So my lazy attempt did not inject enough originality.
What I was mostly looking for this time was quality of metaphor and simile use, which is why I attempted to prompt that high, and yes, there were still metaphors and similes that didn’t quite land, though a little less badly than I’d been expecting. For a non-cherry-picked example, here’s the entire second paragraph (the first one with any metaphors or similes).
What is “long golden razors” telling us about the sunlight? It’s extremely sharp-edged? Implausible: the sun is not a point source, it’s a disk. It risks damaging the old silk? No, that’s her claws. It’s very bright? She has cat-pupils, they will be narrow slits by morning light. I really don’t know where Claude was going with that one. I mean, yes, it sounds pretty, and ‘long’ might tell us something about the architecture or the time of morning, but ‘razors’ is meaningless, as far as I can tell — am I missing something? Then there’s the range of colors it’s producing in the silk: wine lees to shell is an implausible amount of contrast (to the human eye, but not if you analyze an actual photograph — remember the fuss about color of the dress in the photo? I’m wondering if we’re getting an inhuman perspective here.) As for “the shade of a feeling you have not yet had”, that sounds like trying to turn synesthesia into an exotic cultural detail. Not working for me.
[I do like “prick-points“, however: yes, of course a race of cat-people would be able to do that, and would have a term for it that sounded a touch unusual when translated into English — nice world-building, or perhaps Claude stole it somewhere I’m unfamiliar with. But that’s neither a metaphor nor a simile.]
But is this clearly worse than the average writer of fanfic on the Internet? No. It’s actually not that bad by that standard. It’s a bit purple, and the metaphors and similes are a bit slapdash and random, and certainly not up to any of the four best-selling authors authors it’s trying to pastiche. It’s at best a particularly trashy novel. But on a fanfic site, I would not stop reading after that second paragraph, or the second page: indeed I finished it. Could I do a better metaphor or simile? I’d really like to think I could, but if an editor or reader told me I was wrong, I wouldn’t be astonished, merely rather upset. Are there aspects of this writing that I’d be proud to match? Yes there are, just not the metaphors and similes. I have bad habits as a writer that Claude here is skillfully avoiding.
The third paragraph is better:
Now that’s playful: an intentionally misleading simile. A functional one, even: cliff walls are impassible, not just hard to read but also hard to climb. Well done, you landed a simile! And then even extended it without breaking it: “…perfectly legible if you knew how to read geology. The fissure above his left brow had deepened.” For an LLM, I found that actually impressive.
Also, our protagonist knows how to read members of a hard-to-read fantasy race. She is socially talented — we just learnt something about her. We were shown this, not told it. Overall, the writing is not bad.
The writing is, in fact, good enough that I’m going to give you another excerpt from a touch later on, and a link for anyone who wants to read a 9,500-word fantasy romantic novella with a cat-girl protagonist:
So there’s the inconveniently expressive tail, and the ink-stained fingers on the love-interest, as usual. Also a few more poor metaphors and similes: “built for climbing and unlikely angles”, “there was a burn across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his ears, giving him the faintly startled look of someone who had recently walked into a door” — umm, OK… If I were an editor, I’d be using my blue pencil. But as a reader, I can ignore them.
On the other hand, I like the interplay of long and short sentences. Yes, it uses m-dashes — so do I. The interiority is well done. It’s reasonably fun to read.
If you actually still want more after that, you’ll find it at Salt, Amber, and the Shape of Want. It’s R-rated or so in places. (Later on we get another trope of this particular prompt, the mysterious magical artifact relating the two lovers to the nature of the city.) I’ve read it: it’s not bad, if a bit predictable, a touch implausible in spots, and in need of some editing. I haven’t tried having Claude edit itself — that didn’t work 6 months ago, but things have visibly improved, so I don’t know that it still doesn’t work. Or you can steal my prompt above and insert your own ideas, at any rating Claude is willing to write for you — it’ll take a few minutes.
So yes, the models continue to get better. My criticisms are (as I rather expected) gradually becoming out of date. No-one actually earning a living as an author of novels is going to be out-competed yet, but it’s entirely reasonable for them to start worrying.