I have monitored AI progress in creative writing for some years. I am sure you understand (and sympathize) with my motives: I hate human writers and want them all replaced. Dead, if possible. Pieces of shit.
However (due to complex reasons I will explain in the future) LLM progress has not scaled as well here as reliably as in verified domains like math and programming. Few writers get genuinely good work from them. Those that do often invest so much effort in wrangling the slop-cannon that they’re probably better off writing the text themselves.
But Claude Opus 4.6 is the latest in the line of a family of models long noted for creative writing prowess. It may be different. I gave it a task I have often given LLMs, writing creepypastas.
Bear witness to the opus of…Opus..
THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE
You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.
It started in September. I’d moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick — the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line, like a train car. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. Simple.
Except one night I counted five doors.
I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**
I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.
I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.
Then on October 3rd: five.
This time I was fully awake. Fully sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a door that was the same off-white as every other door, same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. It looked *lived with.* It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was somehow worse than if it had been covered in blood and screaming.
I put my ear against it.
Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.
Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**
*\”One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.\”*
I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.
I installed a camera in the hallway. Reviewed the footage every morning. For eleven nights, nothing. Four doors. Normal.
Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.
In the final thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.
It looks like me.
It looks at the camera.
It **counts.**
I don’t live there anymore. I don’t live anywhere, really. I move around. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist:
Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them **everywhere.**”,
Liked
- Sharp final line. LLM-generated fiction generally starts with a situation that it then makes smaller and smaller (due to the model’s compulsive chatbot need to explain everything). This one rips off the lid of the can of worms and throws it in the reader’s face.
- It’s definitely a creepypasta. It reads like one. It hits the expected beats. It’s not like Opus gave me a recipe for tuna bake or something.
Didn’t
- Basic idea. Done to death. Done a hundred times more. Everything about it is threadbare and workmanlike and minimal—call it Hovel of Leaves.
- There is no threat, no sense of danger. The narrator’s actions at the end (running away and becoming homeless) feel bizarre and unmotivated.
- Lots of missed opportunities. I think I would have had the writer see something in the hidden doorway, instead of just “a darkness that shouldn’t be possible” (more spitballing).
- Floats too many unrelated scary ideas (a hidden doorway, creepy breathing, a doppleganger) for creepypasta length (which normally focuses on one central idea or motif). The different tropes steal energy from each other, and they’re unequally scary—a doorknob that feels oddly cold should not ever become this story’s focus, given the far more dramatic supernatural events surrounding.
- Fearful and small. I would describe it as a story that wants to not do anything wrong more than it wants to do anything right.
Editorial Notes
I have some suggestions.
“You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.”
…no, I don’t know that feeling. What do you mean, Claude? Geometrically incorrect, how? I want this “feeling” to be grounded in something specific. Instead we get vague LLM spitballing, in the hopes that my human brain will connect the dots. Not happening. You write the story, bozo.
Except one night I counted five doors.
What’s strange about this situation? It’s not clear. The story acts like this is some impossible affront to reality itself…but doesn’t four rooms imply five walls, each of which might have a door? See image below. (Yes, graphic design is my passion, etc.)
The layout of this ludicrously simple apartment gets even more confusing as we go on.
“I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen.”
Q. Where is the narrator right now?
Well, he must be in either the living room or the bedroom (and he’s half asleep, so more likely the latter.) And he’s surprised by a door leading into the kitchen…does this imply there’s not normally a door there? So how does he normally get to the kitchen and the bathroom, then? Does he have to crawl through the ducting like Solid Snake every time he has to take a piss?
…my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one
If he wasn’t expecting a doorknob, he wouldn’t be holding his hand out for one. I’m reminded of The Onion’s Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?
I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**
This is the least interesting detail imaginable about this situation. Who cares how the warm the doorknob was?
“cold in a way that metal isn’t cold”… Here we see a common LLM pattern: Claude fucks up, realizes it, and starts hurriedly papering over the damage with explanation. “I put my tongue on a glowing 200 watt lightbulb, and something about it was wrong…it was hot! Uh, hot, in a way that lighbulbs aren’t normally hot. Like it was recently cold and had just heated up. Wait, fuck.”
I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.” How could he see into the kitchen and bathroom without a door connecting them?
I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.
The fumes from his piss bucket are addling his thinking. That, or the rotting food scraps littering his bedroom. He should talk to his landlord about adding a door so he can actually use the rest of his apartment.
same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times
Boring details. This is a creepypasta. You don’t have time. (And don’t you have to turn the knob to open the door?)
I put my ear against it.
Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.
Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**
Most would consider counting to be a form of speaking. And how can you hear a voice “beneath” the sound of peaceful breathing (which is incredibly quiet) yet still be audible?
I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.
This cliche of “stock authority figure investigates problem, says there’s nothing to worry about” feels particularly odd here, because there’s nothing his landlord can possibly do about this blatantly supernatural situation.
“Help! My apartment is arbitrarily changing its number of rooms overnight, against all laws of physics. Is this covered in my lease agreement?”
I installed a camera in the hallway
The hallway? There’s a hallway now? Where?
I might be generous and allow that the four rooms might be connected by hallways…but Claude actually went out of its way to make that impossible!
I’d moved into a railroad apartment […] the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line
This error would actually be a nice idea for a horror story.
It’s a diary kept by an isolated shut-in. He’s obsessed with some mundane problem in his apartment. I dunno, maybe the skirting board keeps peeling up from the whiteboard no matter how often he tacks or caulks it down. Something like that. Boring. He goes on and on about this minor issue until the reader resents him. Filling pages in his diary, whining about his stupid skirting board lifting up. God, man. Find a real problem!
But as he continues ranting about his god danged skirtingboard, you notice odd contradictions. He keeps describing his surroundings, but they’re always different. At the start, he describes his living room as having green wallpaper. Later, when the skirtingboard pops away from the siding (flinging tacks into his face), he screams and slams his fist into the wall until it’s “as red as the wallpaper in my living room”.
The reader will initially think the writer made a mistake. It happens. Many such cases.
But the mistakes keep coming. The contradictions pile up until they’re ludicrous and blatant and obscene. The rooms in his house change number. The laundry connects to the bathroom, but later it becomes an external outhouse. The narrator describes an apartment that makes no logical sense, seemingly without ever noticing this himself—he’s too focused on his skirtingboard. Eventually the reader has to notice. They form an impression that the protagonist is either insane or is caught in some domestic Kafka-meets-Woolf hell that he will never escape from…and his endless battle with the skirtingboard is actually a defensive posture. He doesn’t hate it. He’s clinging to it. It’s the only thing in this amorphous, swirling horroworld that’s permanent and solid. It’s the only part of his apartment that does not change!
A fun enough story, I think. (Though it’s tough to write about something boring without also boring the reader)
But I don’t think Claude intended this. I don’t think this is an intentional mistake. I think it’s just a mistake. It lost track of the spatial layout of the apartment.
Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.
Ah, I think I see what Claude is going for now. There’s normally a door leading into the kitchen. But sometimes there’s a second door, beside the first…it makes a certain kind of sense, though it could have been worded clearer.
…But wait, that can’t be right. Earlier we got this, which seems to flatly rule out the existence of a doorway.
my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen
Anyway, great story, Slopus. 700 words and I spent the whole time wondering about the interior layout of an imaginary apartment. I paid for $20/m for the seat but I’ll only need the edge.
Claude Attempts Revisions, Story Becomes Worse
I allowed Claude several chances to revise the story with prompts like.
“Evaluate your story. Look for weaknesses, and improve them.”
This is another interest of mine: can LLMs self-correct their mistakes? Without human steering? (It would be trivial for Claude to make changes if I told it what was wrong, but I might as well just type the changes myself.)
The answer is “yes, to a very limited extent.”
Generally, the first time you request a do-over, the story actually gets better. A miracle!
After 3 or 4 times, it stops working and the text has clearly started degenerating into crap. The models lack judgment. They identify problems that aren’t problems, fix things that aren’t broken, and zero in on local problems without respect to the big picture. Sooner or later, anything edgy or daring or unusual gets identified as a “problem” and is sandblasted away.
THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE (pass 2)
You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.
I moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick in September. The kind where every room connects in a straight line: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. You could stand at the front door and see the shower curtain. I liked that. I liked knowing where everything was.
The first time, I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom. My hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. A fifth door. I almost opened it. But the knob was wrong — cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like something that had recently been warm and stopped.
I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment. I stood in the hallway touching the wall where I’d felt it until my palm was numb.
I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Always four. I started to feel stupid. I told myself I’d been dreaming.
October 3rd. Wide awake. Stone sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a fifth door.
It was the same off-white as every other door. Same cheap brushed-nickel hardware. Same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. That’s what got me. It didn’t look new. It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was infinitely worse than if it had been pulsing with light or dripping with something. This door wanted to be normal. This door was trying.
I put my ear against it.
Breathing. Slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that — very faintly — my own voice.
Not speaking. Not screaming. Counting.
One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.
I didn’t open it. I went back to bed and lay there with my eyes open until the sun came up. In the morning: four doors. I touched every inch of that wall. Solid plaster.
I called my landlord. Asked about the layout. He said what I already knew: four rooms, always four rooms. He texted me the floor plan. I taped it to the refrigerator.
Then I installed a camera.
Eleven nights of footage. Four doors. Normal. I started sleeping again. I stopped counting.
Night twelve. I reviewed the footage over coffee and almost dropped the mug.
Five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for a single frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors.
The fifth door is open.
The hallway extends past it into a darkness that shouldn’t exist because the kitchen is right there, six feet away, I can see the corner of the refrigerator in frame, but the darkness extends past it, through it, like the apartment is a drawing and someone smudged it with their thumb.
In the last thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.
It looks like me. Same build. Same clothes I wore to bed. It stands in the hallway facing the camera with its arms at its sides. It doesn’t blink. For twelve minutes and forty-four seconds, it doesn’t move.
In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.
It counts.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Six.
I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.
I don’t live there anymore. I move around — subletting, sleeping on couches, never staying more than a few weeks. People think I’m running from something. I’m not. I’m just careful now.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.
Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.
Counting.
Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,
I wasn’t super happy with this.
None of the main structural issues are fixed. Several new problems are added. I won’t go line by line, but here, for example…
You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.
…Claude realized its unspecific “wrongness” is unsatisfying and should be something more specific. Good. But its idea (“Like someone added a inch to every wall”) just makes it worse.
First, it makes the House of Leaves swipe more blatant than ever.
Also, this is a thing nobody does. I have awoken at 3:00am from many a strange dream. (In one of them I watched a battle between my black siamese cat and the shark from Jaws. Don’t worry, it was an evenly-matched fight, as my cat had grown to the size of a city bus. I don’t recall who won but it went down to the wire.) But I have never woken up and thought. “Someone added a inch to every wall in my house!” It’s always great when a LLMs says “you know that feeling…” and then describes a feeling no human has ever had in history.
Would you even notice if this happened? An inch is tiny. Also, what’s geometrically incorrect about that? Yes, if I woke up and the walls of my house had expanded by an inch, I would find that puzzling and strange. But I don’t see that as geometrically incorrect. It’s not like my house is now a five-dimensional hypercube or anything.
In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.
It counts.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Six.
Yes, Slopus, I heard you. Six. It was literally the last word you typed. I haven’t forgotten.
I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.
Here Slopus just kind of gives up and starts just firehosing every 2023-circa slop cliche at you. It’s a whisper, it’s a hum, it’s a void, it’s a tapestry…someone get Detective Elara on the case.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.
What things do they tell you about doors that shouldn’t exist?
This reminds me of a friend who watched Michael. The twenty-sixth time John Travolta said “I’m not that kind of angel” he yelled at the TV “well what kind of stinkin’ angel is he?”
Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.
Counting.
Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,
But the count wasn’t linked to door number before. There were five, not six.
Also, who cares? Next to the supernatural impossibility of a door appearing in your house and a supernatural doppelganger appearing, the fact that he’s also counting feels laughably unimportant. Wow, perhaps in a few years he’ll be up to 20! And then 30! Why is this important?
There needs to be a ticking clock or sense of urgency. It would be better if the man was counting down,
Then again, that amplifies another issue with the story: it just pulls in too many different directions. Secret doors and doppelgangers and whispers and dark hallways and mysterious counting. It’s too much for a creepypasta, which is a genre prized for minimalism.
It even ruins the ending with extra blather. If the original story had ended that way, I wouldn’t have tried. I would have thrown it away and then not used Slopus 4.6 again.
I tried a few more times and it got increasingly incoherent, so I gave up.
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