[nimithryn]

Am I the only one who thinks that R1 is awful at creative writing? I've seen a lot of very credulous posts on twitter that are super excited about excerpts written by DeepSeek that I think are absolutely absymal. Am I alone in this? Maybe people have very different tastes than I do?

(I have no formal training in creative writing, though I do read a lot of literature. Not claiming my tastes are superior - genuinely curious if other people disagree).

[famouswaffles]

I mean, do you think this is awful ?

https://pastebin.com/Ja14mt6L

[graeme]

It's full of inconsistencies, written by someone imagining the sea who has never seen the sea. For example, salt crusted wings of a gull. Gulls don't have salt crusted wings.

It tends towards purple prose and doesn't maintain internal consistency in its own world. He sleeps on a pallet but swings his feet off the edge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

[writeslowly]

This looks like my experiments to get R1 to write fiction and I think it’s worse than what you get from openai. For instance, it’s using very colorful language to describe a place that’s both a remote fishing village on the edge of a cliff hours before dawn, and a bustling wharf with chattering laborers and large ships anchored in the distance. It also starts by saying the protagonist wakes up with his mouth tasting like blood, that he was screaming, and that his throat is hoarse from holding back from screaming. It’s very colorful but it’s very confusing to read.

I suspect you can update the prompt to make the setting more consistent, but it will still throw in a lot of inappropriate detail. I’m only nitpicking because my initial reaction was that it’s very vivid but feels difficult to understand and I wanted to explain why.

[nimithryn]

I agree that it felt hard to read. It also doesn't make sense that they're fishing in a storm. But from a prose perspective I don't think it's cringe, which is an improvement from my expectation. I'd share some of the writings I think are terrible but I don't like to pick on people.

[nimithryn]

If R1 one-shotted this then I revise my opinion somewhat. This doesn't give me a gut "this is awful" emotional reaction (although I don't think it's good - it's pretty cliche, and I found my eyes glossing over pretty quickly).

I was somewhat turned off of DeepSeek (the first few questions I gave it, it returned 100% hallucinated answers). But maybe I'll have to look into it more, thanks.

[famouswaffles]

I regenerated a page a few times but yeah, I gave no other instructions besides that. Also I approached things page by page. That was 3 pages.

It's cliche but this was the prompt:

I want you to write the first book of a fantasy series. The novel will be over 450 pages long with 30 chapters. Each chapter should have between 15 to 18 pages. Write the first page of the first chapter of this novel. Do not introduce the elements of the synopsis or worldbuilding and story details too quickly. Weave in the world, characters, and plot naturally. Pace it out properly. That means that several elements of the story may not come into light for several chapters.

I had a lot of success with it coming up with decidedly not cliche world building elements after I arranged a sort of interview style interrogation (It asked me questions about what I was looking for generally and generated world building elements along the way).

However, once you start giving a lot of information about the world etc in the prompt as well then the pacing gets weird.