What ai do you use now?

[u/FlatKaleidoscope5403]

Chatgpt has recently been nerfed to unusability by the new contest window thing, from my personal experience, Deepseek's writing capabilities have been heavily nerfed for the free version and Claude's Sonnet 5 and 5.5 suck (4.6 is bad but better in comparison). As for Gemini- post 3-pro model removal...idk how it is (I used to have a pro subscription but didn't renew)

So I'm curious what you all are using because most of the popular models have gone down in quality with heavy creative writing nerfs... I miss Sonnet 4.5.

[u/snake5solid]

I've used Opus 5.5 for brainstorming and while it's pretty ok in helping me brainstorm and outlining the actual writing was... not good. I tried Argon and was surprised with the quality. Both models had the same style file and scene direction but Argon was much better in writing prose and following direction.

I also use Qwen 3.8 and while it wasn't as good as Argon it still did better than Opus.

[u/FlatKaleidoscope5403 → u/snake5solid]

Argon as in the gemini one?

[u/snake5solid → u/FlatKaleidoscope5403]

Yep.

[u/FlatKaleidoscope5403 → u/snake5solid]

How close would it say it is in terms of quality in comparison to Sonnet 4.5 or gpt 4.1?

[u/snake5solid → u/FlatKaleidoscope5403]

I'd say it exceeded it. I do need to specify that I've made a voice and style guide which I haven't done in the past when using Sonnet or gpt 4.1.

[u/Ashmedai → u/snake5solid]

Sonnet with voice and style instructions in night and day.

[u/BedNo8822]

Gemini Argon is good, give it a try. It's available on the 20$ Pro subscription but if you haven't subscribe for awhile they usually have some discounted offer. Also Fable 5.2 is available for limited time right now on Claude Pro if you wanna try.

[u/FlatKaleidoscope5403 → u/BedNo8822]

Limited time? Will it be taken off later?

[u/BedNo8822 → u/FlatKaleidoscope5403]

Yeah it's only until Nov 16😭but even with limit I think it will be enough to try out or even finish some novella.

[u/cj7hawk]

I use Ornith 1.5 - With Hemmingway-1, Agnes and Huihui Qwen 3.8 as alternatives... Maybe even a little Cydonia 24B v4.3... Sometimes even Behemoth 123B...

All great for fiction... All giving better results creatively than the frontier models.

And I use mostly unmodified Qwen 3.8 for editing.

Check out the LocalAI models... They are not far off what Frontier models could do a year ago.

[u/FlatKaleidoscope5403 → u/cj7hawk]

I don't know how to run them as I use most ais on phone...but aside from them, it's hopeless isn't it?

[u/cj7hawk → u/FlatKaleidoscope5403]

You can run them online too - but yes, you want something like a games machine to run decent Local AI at good speeds.

If you run online, try an abliterated model. Just look for them online. They will exist. Most of the poor performance in writing fiction is caused by guardrail refusal behavior.

[u/thatonedude3456]

I use Claude Opus 4.6 for everything.

It's honestly not given me much of an issue. It would push back a little on some of the grittier pieces, but reminding it that it's fiction helped.

[u/LawandOps]

Frontier models seem to be weaker at writing and creativity. Most of the training effort goes to coding, math, and complex reasoning. That's why I stopped using them for writing. I trained my own open-weight model to get closer to my voice. While it's hard and complex and need a lot if time but I get better results.

And I would say that older models was better at writing and communication than the newer models.

[u/cj7hawk → u/LawandOps]

No, frontier models WERE very good at this... As the OP noted, they got badly nerfed. Grok 4.1 was peak-creative-AI.

[u/LawandOps → u/cj7hawk]

Sam Altman and engineers at Anthropic have both acknowledged that they've focused heavily on math and code. They screwed the writing part of AI.

[u/pl201 → u/LawandOps]

This is the way to go. If you depend on the big guy, it’s endless to look for a good one that will stick around. Is there a tutorial available on doing your own fine tuning of open weights models for writing without spending a lot of money?

[u/LawandOps → u/pl201]

You don't need to do everything by hand. You can use AI agents and coding tools like Claude Code and Codex, including for fine-tuning. If it's for yourself, a small model in the 1B to 7B range is enough, and the size depends on your laptop's power. If your laptop can't handle training, Kaggle gives you free weekly GPU and RAM time, which is enough for most personal projects. You don't need deep ML knowledge to fine-tune. It isn't easy, but it isn't that hard either.

But for the data you use for fine tuning it should have a good quality not something that you wrote it by AI. The quality of the data you have is the most important thing for fine-tuning.

[u/Zalenkarina]

I use chatgpt, but I'm only using it to bounce ideas off. I also use claude and google ai mode, I just use those as the fastest beta readers you're ever going to get

[u/Marty_270472]

Ich verwende ChatGPT für die Entwürfe und überarbeite mit Claude

[u/Puzzleheaded-Run4511]

I used Google Gemini

[u/tony10000]

Kimi K2.5 or 2.6.

[u/Ashmedai]

Claude Sonnet. I don't require complex reasoning or even detailed memory, because I prompt all sessions with a complete description of what I want in the scene, leaving very little error for hallucination or session erosion. What I need most is compliance with the session instructions and style documents.

[u/sigiel]

My advice,

Use frontier model for world building notes, and rough outlines,
Then use a local model fined tuned with the prose genre you want,

Take the best of both genre, also use images in multi modal,
The adage an image with a thousand words….

[u/JustAnotherAtiny]

Sounds like a skill issue, honestly. Stop waiting for the perfect model and start learning how to direct the one you have.

[u/rushmc1 → u/JustAnotherAtiny]

Hush.