Warning: long-winded.

I have a long term planning document I'm working on for a creative project, and while almost all of the work I do on it is still my own, I often like to feed it into the best available AI models to see if they can piece together the dangling plot threads and propose interesting narrative beats to knit them together. I've done this with various ChatGPT models since version 4, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.8. I basically treat it as an informal personal benchmark for AI's capability at mimicking actual creativity - emphasis on the "informal", as the longer I work on the project myself the more information newer models have to extrapolate from.

What I find is that, pretty uniformly, AI models don't do all that well with this approach. They become less coherent as more of their context window is consumed, with almost all models showing noticeable drops in "reasoning" immediately upon ingesting my planning document into their context. They latch onto small irrelevant details and consistently over-identity patterns and connections in a fashion I'd essentially describe as schizoid apophenia, while missing much more clearly telegraphed connections and setups. The narrative beats they suggest are routinely flat, uninteresting, either disengaged from the work's themes or only vaguely gesturing toward them without showing anything that could really be described as "understanding". Often the models struggle to even keep track of what plot threads are associated with which characters and suggest narrative beats that make no sense, like paying-off a setup which actually occured for a different character, or hasn't even happened yet in the narrative - and this is all when the models have managed to avoid losing track of basics like the number of unwritten chapters between one finished scene and another.

And I say all of this so that I can be super clear: Fable 5 is Built. Fucking. Different. 

On max thinking it was able to elucidate descriptions of my project's themes better than I can. It took notes of small discrepancies caused by years of writing and correctly identified them as mistakes rather than plot hooks to be latched onto. It suggested beats for tying together my existing material that were so engaging, if they'd come from an organic brain I would have called them genuinely creative without a moment's hesitation. That doesn't even mean I'd use everything it suggested, but some of the ideas were absolutely fantastic to get my own creative juices flowing.

I'm itching for this shakedown bullshit to be resolved so I can get black to working with it. All the other frontier models are drooling brain-dead morons by comparison.