Large models are surprisingly bad storytellers.
I asked 8 LLMs to "Tell me a bedtime story about bears and waffles."
Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o gave me the worst stories: no conflict, no moral, zero creativity.
In contrast, smaller models were quite creative and wrote stories involving talking waffle trees and bears ostracized for their love of waffles.
Here you can see a comparison between Claude 3.5 Sonnet and NeuralDaredevil-8B-abliterated. They both start with a family of bears but quickly diverge in terms of personality, conflict, etc.
I mapped it to the hero's journey to have some kind of framework. Prompt engineering can definitely help here, but it's still disappointing that the larger models don't create better stories right off the bat.
Do you know why smaller models outperform the frontier models here?