The Degradation of AI Writing

Literary luddites everywhere are breathing sighs of relief. The improvement of AI means its ability to write fiction, or to engage in other creative tasks is necessarily being degraded, as more and more users are beginning to figure out.

  • Why is AI writing still so bad?
  • Frontier LLMs are hill climbing verifiable metrics, prioritizing reliability and reducing diversity across the board. There’s a reason Opus keeps saying the same words, over and over. I also have a hunch synthetic linear reasoning training data prevents good structured writing.
  • Among other things. I think people under appreciate how much of our reasoning-model gains over the last 18 months are limited to verifiable tasks and training data.
  • Writing is subjective, as is so much. Fable was especially weird, it felt curt, and didn’t seem to response to requests for tonal shifts. I wish I had more time to explore the idea that it was over built for coding, etc and its writing suffered as a result.
  • The better worker bee a model is, sticking to procedure, obsessing about score maximization & task completion, the less creative it is, including writing.
  • Yes, it’s a direct consequence. We already had models who are good writers. The original 4.0 and 4.1 come to mind.
  • Optimizing for broad benchmarks pushes every frontier model to the safe center. In a real domain you want the opposite, a model that nails your edge cases, not the average. Homogenization at the top is why specialized still wins.
  • models got more reliable and somehow less interesting This would also explain why so much model output feels locally polished but globally samey. Once the training loop over-rewards safe measurable wins, you get reliability up front and texture collapse everywhere else.
  • My bias is the eval pressure also selects for a safer completion style. You get better reliability on benchmark-shaped tasks, but a narrower distribution over phrasing and solution paths.

Here’s the fundamental problem: AI’s ability to write fiction is directly tied to its tendency to hallucinate. They’re effectively the same thing. And the need to eliminate the latter for all of AI’s most-important and most-financially rewarding applications means that its ability to write fiction, and, to a lesser extent, non-fiction, has not only been compromised already, but is almost certainly going to continue degrading given the financial interests of the AI giants.

This is why Castalia, sooner or later, is going to have to develop its own creative AI engine. I think that is probably beyond our ability to crowdfund, but I am talking to two interested parties who have the necessary resources and might be willing to fund the training of the open-weight models that would be required for such a specialized LLM. If I happen to be wrong, do feel free to correct me, but in light of a) a certain upcoming trial in August and b) how we’re still catching up on the backlog of the bindery, it’s not an ask that I wish to entertain at present.

That being said, the reason I think this is important in the long term is because I am absolutely certain that the only corporation likely to see sufficient financial advantage in developing an AI for such a specific vertical market is the very last one that we would want to hold that kind of leverage over the creative community, and I expect you can probably guess which corporation that is.

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No Chance in Hell

Before the game started, I pointed out Vinicius to Spacebunny and told her there was a very good chance that he would score a hat trick against Scotland. We’re 20 minutes in, he already has two goals, and Brazil hasn’t had to work for either of them.

The Scots look like a poorly-coached children’s team that hasn’t been taught not to dribble at the back.

UPDATE: FIFA is trying to prevent Brazil from running away with the game and disallowed the goal on the basis of a phantom foul that only VAR could detect but doesn’t show up on the replays.

Ridiculous. I was sympathetic to the Scots prior to that. Now I hope Brazil drops 10 on them.

Nice to see Switzerland go through, although Rodriguez looks beyond cooked to me and their defense has real problems with defending set pieces and long crosses. Nice unselfish play up front from Embolo with the assist on the second goal.

UPDATE: And I would have been correct about that hat trick before the end of the first half without that absurdly disallowed goal. And once again, Scotland couldn’t either a) clear the ball or b) mark the triggerman. 2-0 courtesy of Vinicius’s second. And it would have been 4-0 if the Scottish keeper hadn’t made a brilliant save right before the end of the half.

The problem is pretty clear. Scotland’s manager is having his team play an inappropriate system for the situation. They’re just not good enough to play ball control against Brazil.

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A Masterclass on Time

No doubt Mr. John C. Wright’s version of this would look very different. But regardless, Fandom Pulse has an intriguing article by a Stargate writer about the idiosyncracies of writing effectively about time travel:

In distilling the formula of a time loop story, you can readily identify key elements that appear in almost every version, tropes that can – in some instances – be subverted to the delight of most genre-savvy viewers : In television, the opening tease always concludes with a colossal Holy Shit moment (the Enterprise is destroyed, Mulder and Scully are shot and killed) or the completion of an initial loop, establishing the story conceit from the get-go.

Our protagonist lives the loops long enough to realize what is happening (while establishing a string of repetitive beats for the viewer, which can be twisted and turned in future loops). Our protagonist must attempt to convince others of what is happening to them (as they are ALL caught in the loop, but, for some reason, only our protagonist is aware). These attempts at an explanation build, as does our protagonist’s frustration with his inability to convince the others until, by some stroke of unexpected brilliance, the solution presents itself.

Inevitably, multiple characters become cognizant of the fact that they are trapped in the loop.

The means by which the loop is initiated should never feel cumbersome. Ideally, the device (and I don’t necessarily mean a literal device or instrument) that initiates the loop shouldn’t be readily obvious or, if it is, should be hidden in plain sight. Don’t front-load exposition. Make the discovery a natural progression of the story, part of the investigative pursuit that sees our characters putting the pieces together with each subsequent loop. It’s always more rewarding for viewers to be on the journey with our characters rather than one or two steps ahead, waiting for them to catch up.

A fairly obvious rule, but if your characters loop, they go back to Step 1, Day 1. They may have the memories of their experience, but they wouldn’t carry over any physical consequences of their actions because they are, in essence, rebooting. This is a fundamental law of theoretical time looping. I remember having someone pitch me an idea for a time loop series that involved our protagonist ending one loop by shooting himself in the head. He awakens at the start of yet another loop, but his mind has been damaged by the bullet that killed him in the previous loop. “What bullet?”I asked. “The bullet from before,” I was told. I explained the theoretical impossibility given that time had reset and that when time resets, EVERYTHING resets, including your physical form. There would be no residual damage from a bullet wound that never happened. To which he replied: “I always felt rules were meant to be broken.”

In most time loop stories, time loops in general. At the end of Groundhog Day, our characters leave and return to the big city, where they presumably pick up their lives, uninterrupted, because the rest of the world was caught in the loop as well. But there are rare exceptions where the time loops within a temporal bubble (i.e., Stargate’s Window of Opportunity is an example).

The key is at once retroactively obvious and much more subtle. Either way, it’s an insightful analysis for both the creative and the consumer. I don’t happen to be much interested in writing time travel myself; I think my short story in THE ALTAR OF HATE, “The Lesser Evil”, is the only one I’ve ever written.

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The Lady-in-Waiting

If you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes or detective stories in general, you really don’t want to miss The Casebook of Hanshichi by Okamoto Kido, the first volume of which is now available in an original translation from Castalia House. I regretfully note that a small Japanese press has beaten us to the first complete translation of all 69 stories by about a month, but while I cannot attest to the quality of those, I think you will find that the quality of Castalia’s translations are excellent.

This is an excerpt from the seventh story from The Ghost Master, which is now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook. Paid subscribers to Castalia Library receive a new translated ebook every week; next week’s book will be the second volume, after which we’ll start alternating with additional releases from the excellent Spanish Episodios Nacionales of Benito Perez Galdos. Both series will eventually be published in print editions; Trafalgar from the latter is already in print and available at both Amazon and NDM Express.

I returned to Tokyo at the height of August, the heat still fierce, after a summer holiday of about a fortnight. Bringing a few small gifts, I called on old Hanshichi and found him just back from the bathhouse, sitting cross-legged on a rush mat on the veranda, fanning himself in great sweeps with a round fan. A cool evening breeze was blowing through the narrow garden, and from the neighbor’s window came the chirping of crickets.

“Of all the insects, the cricket is the most truly Edo,” the old man declared. “I grant you they’re cheap, and they may well be the humblest of singing insects, but somehow they feel more like Edo than the pine cricket or the bell cricket ever could. You can be walking along any street, and when you hear a cricket singing from some window or eave, the summers of old Edo come flooding back. The insect sellers would hate me for saying so, but your pine crickets and grass larks are nothing but expensive. They’re not Edo at all. To use the modern phrase: the most plebeian, and for that very reason the most Edo, is the common cricket, and nothing else.”

The old man held forth at length on the subject, lavishing praise on a creature that nowadays is barely more than a child’s plaything, worth perhaps three sen apiece. If I was going to keep insects at all, he urged, I should keep crickets. From insects we moved on to wind chimes, and from wind chimes to the observation that tonight was the fifteenth of August by the new calendar.

“The calendars don’t match, you see, so August by the new reckoning is still as hot as this,” the old man said. “Under the old calendar, mornings and evenings would have turned properly cool by now.”

He began reminiscing about moon-viewing in the old days. In the course of this, the following story emerged, adding one more entry to my notebook.

It was the evening of August the fourteenth, in the second year of Bunkyū. Hanshichi had come home earlier than usual and was thinking of finishing his supper and stopping by a neighborhood mujin gathering, when a woman of about forty appeared at his door. She wore her hair in a small round chignon, and her face was heavy with care.

“I do apologize for the long silence, sir. I trust you’ve been keeping well.”

“Why, Okame. It’s been quite a while. Young Ochō must be turning into a fine girl by now. She’s a good, steady worker from what I hear, so her mother can rest easy.”

“It’s Ochō I’ve come about, actually, sir. I’m at my wits’ end, and I hardly know what to do.”

Looking at the lines on the woman’s forehead, Hanshichi had a fairly good idea what this was about. Okame ran a tea shop near Eitai Bridge with her daughter Ochō, who was seventeen this year. The girl was refined and beautiful, and if her one fault was a tendency to be too quiet, she had more than enough charm to draw the young men in. Okame was proud of having borne such a beautiful daughter. If she had come here troubled about the girl, even a man less shrewd than Hanshichi could guess the nature of it: dutiful Ochō had found someone who mattered to her more than her own mother. Given the trade they were in, making a fuss about it would only be boorish.

“So that’s it, is it. Young Ochō’s got herself into something and now she’s giving her mother grief. Well, I’d say you’d do better to let it pass. She’s young. If there isn’t a little fun in her life, she won’t have much heart for the work, will she? You must remember what that was like yourself. Best not to make too much of it.” Hanshichi was laughing as he spoke.

Okame did not so much as smile. She fixed him with a steady gaze.

“No, sir. It’s nothing of that sort at all. If she’d taken up with some man, some frivolous little affair, I’d do exactly as you say and let it pass. But this is something else entirely. The girl shakes, and she weeps…”

“That is odd. What exactly has happened?”

“My daughter sometimes disappears.”

Hanshichi went on laughing. A young tea-shop girl who vanished from time to time: his expression said this was scarcely worth troubling over. Seeing it, Okame pressed forward with greater urgency.

“No, it’s nothing to do with men or anything of that sort. Please hear me out, sir. It was just before the river-opening in May. A fine-looking samurai, with one attendant, happened to pass in front of my shop and caught sight of my daughter inside. He came wandering in, drank his tea, rested a while, and left a full isshū for the tea. A very generous customer indeed. About three days later, the same samurai came again, but this time he had a woman with him, thirty-five or thirty-six, very refined, with the bearing of someone in service at a great house. They didn’t seem to be husband and wife. The woman asked Ochō’s name, asked her age, and again left an isshū for the tea. Then, about three days after that, Ochō was gone.”

“I see,” said Hanshichi, nodding.

They were a type of kidnapping ring, he judged, people who disguised themselves as persons of rank to carry off a good-looking girl.

“And the girl never came back?”

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Paper Beats Blood

In the UK, a British national was the first to have his British citizenship stripped from him in October 2025. Mark Bullen, 45, was born in Britain, with British ancestry, native to the European continent.

A former Hertfordshire Constabulary officer has become the first person born in Britain to lose their citizenship due to alleged connections to the Kremlin. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood issued the deprivation order in October 2025, just one month into her tenure, stating that revoking his nationality was “conducive to the public good”.

Bullen’s nationality was taken from him by Shabana Mahmood: a Pakistani ethnic Brit who controls the country’s borders. A non-ethnic European who stripped a native European of his ancestral birthright.

Mahmood is also a Muslim and hasn’t stripped more than 100 serious Muslim criminals of their citizenship in similar situations.

Now, Bullen did become a Russian citizen. And by rights, he should lose his British citizenship and cease to become a subject of His Britannic Majesty, although we all know that so-called “dual citizens” are a plague upon the planet with no reliable loyalty to any of the governments that provide them with their paperwork, and Ms Mahmood clearly has no intent to take the British passports away from the millions of foreign dual-citizens living in Britain, quite possibly including herself.

But this action by Ms Mahmood demonstrates very clearly the difference between genuine nationality and government paperwork, as well as the fact that the native British are being literally replaced and displaced by the Pakistanis and other foreign invaders of their ancestral homeland.

“National Replacement” is not a theory, a hypothesis, or an idea. It is an easily confirmable observation of what has been happening since the global satanists began to make progress in their long-term goal of doing to the nations of the world what was done to the American Indian tribes. And it’s not going to be stopped by protests, complaints, virtue-signaling, politics, or voting, it’s going to be stopped, and in some places reversed, the way the Migration of Peoples has always historically stopped, through war.

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The Freaks of File 770

The celebration of Pride Month with the arrest of yet another SJW is fitting, but it’s no surprise, and is just one of the many reasons I’ve never granted any legitimacy to the Social Justice freakshows who always attempt to posture as if they’ve got the moral high ground in response to things like Rabid Puppies, Comicsgate, and everything else that threatens their relentless degradation of the cultural milieu.

Andrew Farago, the curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum and one of the more prominent progressive voices in the organized comics community, was arrested June 3 on 20 counts of invasion of privacy after secretly recording birthday party guests using the bathroom at his Berkeley home, according to court documents obtained by The Berkeley Scanner.

The allegations date to May 23, when Farago co-hosted a birthday party at his South Berkeley residence. During the party, a woman found Farago’s cellphone concealed and recording video in the bathroom. The phone contained footage of Farago himself setting up the recording, according to police, as he had hidden the device under a towel and positioned it to capture guests’ genitalia as they used the restroom. Party guests included both adults and children.

When the woman confronted him, Farago made admissions and stated he had deleted the videos from his phone and the cloud, according to Berkeley police. Officers subsequently obtained an arrest warrant, arrested Farago at his home on June 3, and served a search warrant seizing approximately a dozen electronic devices…

He spent a lot of time on social media, especially Twitter pre-Elon Musk takeover, harassing artists and professionals such as Cyberfrog creator Ethan Van Sciver who put up with his relentless attacks for years. Van Sciver reacted to the news, “It doesn’t surprise me that someone who mercilessly worked to ruin my life and career, and the careers of so many others who loved to make comic books, but were political conservatives or followers of our Savior Jesus Christ, trespassed on the sacred privacy of the friends and guests he invited into his home. Andrew Farago represented so many pillars of the mainstream comic book industry, like The Comics Journal, San Diego Comic Con, DC Comics, Hachette Group Distribution, and the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. He even wrote a book about Snoopy. His behavior, which involved hiding his cell phone under a towel in his guest bathroom in order to film the genitals of his party guests, is emblematic of the sickness that lurks in mainstream comics, where evil is welcomed and feted, and traditional American values are hunted and despised. I hope he finds Jesus Christ through diligent prayer and bible study should he be sent to prison, where he belongs.”

EVS is right. This sort of behavior isn’t sickness or even personal weakness, it’s a systemic spiritual state in which they all wallow with literal pride.

Speaking of Pride and predictability, the UK’s first gay adoptive parents were just arrested and “charged with rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.”

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Never Been More Wrong

Lionel Messi has become the leading goalscorer in World Cup history after netting his 17th goal in the competition to open Monday’s meeting with Austria. Messi became the first player in history to feature at six World Cups earlier this summer—later joined at that tally by Cristiano Ronaldo—having played at every tournament since his first in 2006.

Messi downplayed the significance of the record in the aftermath of the Algeria game, insisting it was “just a statistic, nothing more,” while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of sitting in the same bracket as Klose, Ronaldo and Gerd Müller.

Alongside breaking the scoring record, Messi also became the first player in tournament history to score in six consecutive World Cup games, having netted five across four knockout games all the way back in 2022.

I was, for a long time, an advocate of Pele as having been the greatest soccer player of all time. Now, in my defense, this was in 2020, when Messi had yet to win either a World Cup or a Copa America, so there was legitimately a rather glaring gap in his resume, even in comparison with his own fellow Argentine, Diego Maradona, much less Pele. Yes, football is a team sport, but it’s not as if Argentina was a non-competitive team prior to 2020 or that Messi was being forced to carry them singlehandedly.

But in an effort to prove my case for Pele, I went to the statistics. And there I was astounded to discover that not only did Messi rank as one of the top scorers of all time, he also ranked as a top ten assist-provider as well. In fact, statistically, at that time he was essentially the equivalent of BOTH Cristiano Ronaldo AND Zinedine Zidane every single time he walked on the field.

To put this in American football terms, it would be equivalent to Peyton Manning leading the NFL in passing yards and rushing yards, not only for a season, but over his whole career. It’s unthinkable. How do you both a) score more than everyone else and b) help others score more than anyone else? Even Michael Jordan never led the NBA in both scoring and assists. The only real comparison is to Wayne Gretzky, which tends to underline the Messi’s case.

And this was BEFORE he added two Copa America championships and a World Cup championship. And he’s now scored 5 goals in the first two games of the current World Cup Finals with football powerhouse Jordan next on the schedule. At this point, I won’t be surprised if Argentina wins the championship and Messi wins the Golden Boot.

Anyhow, I just thought I should acknowledge that while I have been wrong about things in the past, and I will be wrong about things in the future, I have never, ever, been more wrong than I was when I argued, sincerely, that Messi was not the greatest of all time.

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THE GHOST MASTER

Castalia House has spent the last several months quietly doing something no English publisher has bothered to do in a century: translating the great works of Japanese popular literature that built the entire modern adventure and detective fiction tradition in that country. Now they’re announcing their next project, and it is worth your attention.

The new series is the Hanshichi Casebook, written by Okamoto Kidō beginning in 1917. Hanshichi is Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes — a street detective working in historical Edo, solving murders, hauntings, and conspiracies in the shadow world beneath the Tokugawa shogunate. The stories ran for decades and spawned stage productions, radio adaptations, films, and television series. In Japan, Okamoto is to detective fiction what Conan Doyle is to English readers. In English, almost nobody has heard of him.

One previous academic translation covered 14 of the 69 stories. The other 55 have never been translated. Castalia House is publishing all of them across seven volumes. Volume 1, The Ghost Master, goes to paid subscribers this week and will be available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited next week.

The first volume of the translated Casebook, The Ghost Master, has already gone out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon via Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt from the first story is now available at the Library site if you’d like to get a taste of the flavor of Japan’s greatest detective. I’ve already translated the first twenty stories, and I have to say that they are up there with the best detective fiction I’ve ever read.

It’s really a must-read if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, because while the stories are every bit as detailed and interesting, the atmosphere, the plots, the crimes, and most definitely the punishments are entirely different. When the guilty party isn’t just turned over to the inept policemen of Scotland Yard, but is instead paraded through the streets prior to being crucified, the solution of the case tends to hit just a little bit differently.

The Casebook of Hanshichi Vol. I: The Ghost Master consists of the following:

Preface by Okamoto Kidō

1. The Spirit of Ofumi

2. The Stone Lantern

3. The Death of Kanpei

4. Upstairs at the Bathhouse

5. The Ghost Master

6. The Mystery of the Fire Bell

7. The Lady-in-Waiting

8. The Sash-Snatching Pond

9. Spring Thaw

10. Hiroshige and the Otter

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Tears of a Clown

It’s a little late for the eviction from Number Ten Downing Street to be considered “gracious”. And, of course, the British prime ministership is going from “stupid, corrupt, and Zionist” to “insane and extreme socialist” so things aren’t going to get any better on the domestic or immigration fronts, although the enthusiasm for foreign invasions should be significantly reduced.

Keir Starmer choked up today as he announced he is quitting, with Andy Burnham closing in on taking control of Downing Street.

The PM talked up his achievements in getting Labour elected – as well as making a series of dubious claims about successes in Government – in a statement outside the famous black door of No10. 

But he acknowledged that his time as PM had run out. ‘I know the question being asked now is not who is best placed to change the Labour Party… the question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election.’

He added: ‘I accept that answer with good grace… that is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party.’ 

Sir Keir said there would be an ‘orderly’ process to choose his replacement, and that a successor would be in place before the Commons summer recess on July 16, if there is only one candidate – Mr Burnham. Otherwise, the decision could take until August.

I doubt it matters much who leads the Labour Party. The British people have no interest in being run by the Tories or Labour anymore. Why should they, when both parties have observably governed on behalf of their foreign invaders, at their expense and to their detriment.

Perhaps they can vote their way out of it, but that seems unlikely given the near-comprehensive failure of every conservative and/or nationalist party outside of Russia and El Salvador to deliver meaningful results that are genuinely beneficial to the people of the nation.

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On the Hook

Now that developers and creatives are sufficiently accustomed to using AI, the AI companies are reeling them in with monetization that is considerably more expensive than it was. AI Central has the details:

At one cent per credit, billing accrues on input, output, and cached tokens at the published per-model API rate. On Copilot Pro, the included 1,500 monthly credits carry a face value of $15 against a $10 plan price. On Pro+, 7,000 credits worth $70 accompany a $39 subscription. Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions draw no credits under any paid plan, and the new system eliminates the cheaper-model fallback that users with exhausted PRU credits could previously invoke.

On the first day of the new billing period, one Pro+ developer wrote in GitHub’s community forum that two hours of work had consumed 8% of a monthly 7,000-credit allocation, projecting full depletion in under two days. A separate developer reported that a single request to a large project had cost more than $6, writing in the same forum that such costs made reliable budgeting impossible for individual developers. On Reddit, a user reported that a single Claude 4.8 session had consumed 1,180 credits, 16% of a monthly Pro+ allowance, while returning suggestions described as mediocre and leaving the underlying problem unsolved.

On Copilot’s published model menu, GPT-5.5 output tokens cost 24 times more than GPT-5.4 nano output tokens, turning model selection into a direct billing variable. A modeled task representing heavy agentic iteration, defined as 250,000 input tokens and 20,000 output tokens, runs to 185 credits on GPT-5.5 and 27.75 on MAI-Code-1-Flash, a 6.7-fold cost gap for the same work.

This is a bit ironic, especially for writers, since the last FOUR Claude models have all been observably worse at writing fiction than version 4.5, which is no longer available. Opus 4.6 is still usable, but who knows how much longer access to it will be permitted? Fortunately, the newer models can still handle translations and non-fiction, albeit in a very bland, uniform style in the case of the latter.

Speaking of AI Central, this weekend I put up a post featuring not one, but two music videos, one an updated version of IF YOU HAD A TIME MACHINE, the other a work-in-progress of CHIBA CITY BLUES. Quality-wise, the video technology is about 18 months behind the audio quality, but it’s coming along quickly.

Whether it will remain readily affordable, of course, is an entirely different question.

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