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Claude Fable on Max appears very very good at literary analysis, at least in the small number of trials I’ve tested (concentrated in contemporary science fiction published in English)
It still isn’t superhuman, but at this point I think the quality and density of insights is greater than the majority of either prestigious literary reviews published in prestige magazines, or popular posts on Substack/other online searches.
Surprisingly it’s still very bad at *writing,* relatively speaking. I now see high-quality insights laundered in the standard LLM-slop voice. It’s a vertiginous experience. Odd.
I think Claude Fable can write a reasonably high quality piece of fiction. The issue I've run into is that Claude Fable appears to be able to write exactly one reasonably high-quality piece of fiction, something like
An approximately-2000-word literary short story, titled "[definite article] [noun: tool]", in the form of a maintenance manual addressed to whoever holds the post next. The narrator is the repairer of instruments in a provincial town where the mill closed a decade ago, and is of approximately retirement age, and has held this position for the... (read more)
I fed Fable this essay and asked it to search online for other reviews, and then identify points neither I nor other reviewers have covered. It was surprisingly able to identify several. It was able to identify one point my friends and I discussed after I published the post (but with a somewhat different and complementary frame), one point I considered but underrated the importance of, and one point I never considered before. It also made one point that I believe is wrong. Still, ¾ is very good.
They weren’t minor points either! By my lights the insight density is incredibly high. Arguably higher than almost every other review of Chiang.
Keep in mind I read Chiang’s fiction many times and I've read literally dozens of high-effort reviews, including ones by English professors published in places like The New Yorker, by semi-famous tech bloggers (including one who’s now a senior researcher at Claude’s parent company), etc. So it’s quite a high bar to be beating.