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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31921 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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"Another day, another LLM" is definitely correct. Deep Seek also released their newest variant DeepSeek-V3-0324 yesterday. DeepSeek-V3-0324 is a significant improvement over DeepSeek-V3 and even beats Claude 3.7 Sonnet in many benchmarks, and not to mention, it's open weight! I guess it's less sexy since it's a text-only model and we already have highly capable ones that are generally interchangeable for most purposes, but I'm excited to see the future DeepSeek-R2 that'll be based on this improvement.

Do you know if it beats Claude 3.7 for writing? I have wasted shameful amounts of money in the last week: it gets character consistency and plot progression perfectly, even carefully adding in hooks for potential future plots. It’s the only model I’ve ever tried that gets long-form writing right.

I haven't tried Claude 3.7 for creative writing but it's definitely better than the existing DeepSeek-V3 from my limited experience with it, so feel free to test it out. It's a lot less repetitive at longer context lengths which actually makes it usable for creative exercises. The original DeepSeek-V3 was likely more optimized for multi-shot prompting for factual queries, which made it strictly follow the reasoning, tone and structure of earlier examples. Good for factual determinations but not so good for being creative and non-repetitive.

From what I can tell it is a giant improvement over V3 and a substantial one over R2. People from 4chan are saying it's suspiciously good at following their outlines and even uses a similar format, so they guess it's been trained on their writing (DeepSeek openly trains on user data). Generally it's in the same league as Sonnets. I recommend giving it a try.

Wow, that's great to hear. I'm eagerly looking forward to the commoditization of novel writing (and videogame NPC dialogue), but I didn't think we'd figured out yet how to maintain long-term consistency.

Yeah, I'm really impressed, especially since I was pretty nasty about 3.7 in another thread. There are some caveats:

  • It's EXPENSIVE. I burned through enough money for multiple AAA games in the last week.
  • I have to limit the context to 20,000 tokens because of the expense, which is less than it sounds. If a character drops out for more than three or four scenes, they may come back with a noticeably different voice. You can limit this with summarisation / manually copy-pasting character introductions into the author notes when they reappear, so a character who was shy will stay shy, but the way they're shy may change.
  • For similar reasons, the tone can drift. I especially notice a slow trend towards analytical/clinical/technical style writing appears about 30,000 words in unless you force correct it.
  • I use Guided Generations for guiding new generations. Not the clothes etc. stuff, just 'write the next scene in this way' style prompts to keep the AI on track.
  • The plot is still being made up as you go along, and won't be consistent in the way that a novel is consistent unless you work to make it so.
  • Claude 3.7 is surprisingly permissive but the limits may cause trouble for certain types of stories. I don't know if you could do misery memoirs (explicit abuse), or Game of Thrones (explicit torture, harm). As far as I can figure out, it will refuse to depict on-screen sex or other explicit actions, or serious on-screen violence/damage to a human character.

Long-term consistency in video game NPCs is probably a lot easier - each NPC gets 4000 token summary and produces max 1000 token replies. Global consistency is taken care of by the game state.

The issue for game NPCs is ensuring total consistency with the setting and characters and not making up any lore at all. Even late generation LLMs still struggle with this in hallucination (I like to ask about the political backgrounds of Chinese politicians, many of which have no content online beyond two or three generations back, and I’ve seen even latest models completely BS).

I haven't been poking at it with a stick like you have, but in general Claude is mostly content to stick to the scenario absent provocation. It's not like Deepseek R1 where reigning in the constant flow of random creativity gets exhausting and irritating after a while.

Give Claude explicit instructions about maintaining consistency and I wouldn't expect to have serious issues.

What sort of stories do you use it for?

Scenarios, mostly. I have a scenario that's basically the borrowers / Grounded (you are a tiny person in the walls, stay alive and don't be seen), a scenario that's the setting from Rosario + Vampire (you have been enrolled in a prestigious boarding school, but all the other students are monsters in disguise), etc. I also have a romance that I was working on. I also have a Japanese-teaching bot that takes place in your standard anime setting for colour and to provide conversation topics.

I was wondering whether to discuss it, but felt too lazy given that it was 1 am. Like you, I'd rather wait for R2, I always try and use reasoning models for anything complex, barring trivial answers

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