I have found that modern LLMs, specifically Claude Sonnet 3.5 (specifically the 'new' version sometimes dubbed '3.6' by enthusiasts), are surprisingly good at writing prose fiction. At some indeterminate point, they crossed the vague line of being enjoyable because it was impressive to see a computer spit out coherent words, to being enjoyable because the words themselves were interesting.
A particular game I like is to use this prompt: Please write a scene which includes the phrase '…''.
Where the phrase is some abstract sentence or snippet from the digital scrapbook I maintain. It’s fascinating to see the ways the algorithm works to construct a scene, characters and dialogue around these free-floating signifiers.
I’ve decided to catalogue some of the more interesting pieces I’ve generated here, both as a record and so I can easily share them with others.
Note that this is certainly not an unbiased representation of Claude’s output - I’m only sharing the ones I liked well enough to bother copying into VS Code and format. But I think it still shows the state of this bizarre, alien technology.
Not everything here is from Claude, but when that’s the case, I will mention so on that piece’s individual page.