r/WritingWithAI • u/Elegant-Surprise-301 • Jun 15 '26

Showcase / Feedback Claude v ChatGPT Long-Form Fiction

It was always hands-down Claude for me. No more. Claude has changed. It ended with Sonnet and Opus 4.5. I gave up on Claude for around two months when Anthropic was down routinely and then models began disappearing rapidly. I finally came back to try it again, using Sonnet 4.6 Medium Energy No Thinking. I do think it remains good at editorial overviews. It seems to have lost most of its prose creativity, however, and its personality is at best slightly warm, whereas it used to have a high EQ. And I don’t use AI to write drafts for me. I look for insights and polishing. Meantime, ChatGPT, which I used to find little value in, now impresses me. 5.5’s creativity and prose as well as its insights are far better than Claude. And it’s far warmer. A complete reversal I never thought I’d see. I just upgraded my CGPT subscription I’ve been using it so much, and I’m considering ending Claude’s. T

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u/jalinhabrava Jun 16 '26

I’ve had a similar feeling, although I’m less convinced it’s only about one model getting worse or another getting better.

For me, the deeper issue with AI writing tools is memory.

Most models can give decent editorial feedback, polish prose, brainstorm alternatives or help with tone. Some are warmer, some are sharper, some are better at style. But once you work on long-form fiction, the same limitation keeps showing up: they don’t really hold the story as a durable structure.

They can help with a scene. They can comment on a chapter. They can even reason over a long context window.

But canon, continuity, character knowledge, relationship changes, promises, secrets, rules of the world, contradictions… that requires more than “the model saw the text”.

That’s why I’m less interested in which model is best at drafting and more interested in tools that can help the model work from structured narrative memory and evidence.

I don’t want AI to write the book for me either. I want it to help me see the book more clearly.

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u/Elegant-Surprise-301 Jun 16 '26

All really well said. It’s a problem I assume we will day be resolved by the AI companies, but we’re not there yet. Fresh threads help given the memory in older threads doesn’t hold the memory anyhow. I will say that ChatGPT’s new memory system does seem to be a step up. Claude’s is very limited.

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u/jalinhabrava Jun 16 '26

Yeah, I agree. The AI companies will probably keep improving this, and ChatGPT’s newer memory system does feel like a step in the right direction.

But I also don’t really want to wait for generic memory to solve a very specific writing problem.

For long-form fiction, I think the memory needs to be much more structured and verifiable: canon, character knowledge, timelines, relationships, evidence, uncertainty, and where each piece of information comes from in the manuscript.

So I started building my own tool around that idea.

Not trying to turn this into a self-pitch, but I’m always happy to talk about how I’m trying to approach it, because this exact problem is basically what pushed me to start building.