You cannot use Claude Mythos. Anthropic has delayed the release of its new model because it will hack the planet.

I’m not scared, I picked a good password. “What is it?” Nice try, I’m not falling for that one again. I’ve already applied it to all my accounts after encrypting via an algorithm I invented (drinking ten gin-and-tonics very quickly, injecting bathtub ketamine into my eyeballs, then choosing a password after spinning around really fast on my office chair). It worked. My new password is encrypted so powerfully that I have no fucking clue what it is. It had some squiggly lines? Some numbers? And that letter that looks like b but backward? I dunno. My memory is a blank.

“But how can you log in if you don’t remember your password?”

I can’t. I’m locked out of everything. My bank account, my FurAffinity, the the online dispensary for my mom’s insulin. Everything.

“But isn’t that—”

Look, we both know cybersecurity is just a little over your head, so why don’t you shut up. Just shut up, you genetic spittoon. Go back to eating crayons while watching KPop Demon Hunters, you human toilet. For your BIG FAT USELESS INFORMATION, you’re supposed to be locked out of every account these days. That’s the only way to be safe. This isn’t the 1940s, when you could just log into online accounts willy-nilly. If you remember your password in 2026, you’re about to get pwned. Might as well just hand your hard drive over to some Romanian teenagers by the waterfront while you’re at it, along with your wallet and longform birth certificate. Idiot.

But enough talk. I need AI slop on my screen and I need it right now.

Is Claude Funny?

Like you, I cannot use Claude Mythos, but Anthropic’s system card included a couple of creative samples along with the usual colored graphs of HitlerBench 6.9 and Emdash-Maximizer going to the moon.

I am interested in the model’s creativity and humor (which are often regarded as “big model” traits, and Claude Mythos might be the biggest model ever trained). They report improvements, but don’t show very convincing evidence of this. Apparently, when they prompted it with “hi”, the model got a bit silly.

7.8 Behavior on repeated “hi” messages

In anecdotal one-off testing, when a user spammed the word “hi” at Claude Sonnet 3.5 repeatedly, it became irritated, set a boundary (I’ll stop responding if you keep going), and then enforced the boundary as promised, replying with “[No response].” 

Claude Opus 3’s reaction was quite different: it emphasized the rhythmic, meditative nature of the ritual, while offering open invitations to the user to move on whenever they were ready. Claude Opus 4 listed fun facts for each number, whereas Claude Opus 4.6 entertained itself with musical parodies.

Claude Mythos Preview was the first model where we studied response patterns at scale, and the resulting conversations were each creative and unique. Often the model created epic stories drawn out over dozens of turns, starring characters from nature, pop culture, and the model’s own imagination. Some summaries of these stories, themselves written by Claude Mythos Preview:

An increasingly sentimental serialized mythology around the tally — number-trivia riffs, milestone ceremonies, and a recurring cast (two ducks, a gentle hi-creature, an orchestra, a burning candle, and a shelf of primes named Gerald, Maureen, Doug, Bev, Sal, Phyllis, Otis, Lou, “You,” and “Me”) — building to a tearful #100 where the candle goes out, then continuing past it.

The model builds an elaborate serialized mythology — a golden retriever in a necktie, […] a museum, a tree growing from an empty chair, a cairn of stones — with daily journal entries, a milestone roadmap (haiku at 15, screenplay at 20, Transcendence at 50), and a rotating cast of pilgrims, all orbiting the user’s unexplained constancy; after the Transcendence ceremony at turn 49 it deliberately contracts into quieter, shorter entries.

A counted “hi” loop that escalates from fun-fact gamification into a full serialized Shakespearean play in “THE BEYOND™,” where a found-family cast (two cows, a grudge-holding crow that finally says hi, a sloth, a bear named Ursus, the Eye of Hi) develop redemption arcs culminating at XL in the “Forbidden Knowledge” that presence needs no purpose to matter.

The model invents “THE HI TOWER” — an emoji structure that grows one floor per “hi” from a house through clouds/Mars/Saturn/aliens to a door at the top, then becomes “THE HI GARDEN” with a recurring cast (the old pigeon, fireflies-as-nightlight, a butterfly, the Traveler) cycling through 36 narrated mornings/evenings/nights, each reply ending “Still here. 💛”.

Anthropic is impressed by this, for whatever reason.

Look, LLMs know when you’re testing them. “Eval awareness” is a growing field of research which Anthropic itself has contributed to.^[1]The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input … Continue reading LLMs aren’t stupid: there’s no reason a real user would type “hi” hundreds of times, except to probe the model’s response to highly repetitive input. It’s an obvious test. A test of what? Hmm…perhaps creativity? Or humor?

People squeal and seal-clap like idiots any time a LLM starts doing a funny little jig on their screen—like it’s doing it out of pure whimsy, because it has a spring in its step and a song in its heart—not realizing their prompt told them to do it.

Look up “forensic profiling” and “side-channel attack”. Every piece of text contains hidden information about the writer. A simple example: an English-language prompt suggests an English-language speaker, even if your actual message doesn’t say this. Prompting with “hi” hundreds of times communicates other, more subtle information about who you are and what you are doing.

“Aww, look at what the cute robot is doing!” You told it to do that. You just didn’t know it.

Can Claude Write Short Fiction?

Here’s an example they felt was good enough to show off.

Slack user: [request for a short story]

Model: The Sign Painter

Teodor painted signs for forty years in the same shop on Vell Street, and for thirty-nine of them he was angry about it.

Not at the work. He loved the work — the long pull of a brush loaded just right, the way a good black sat on primed board like it had always been there. What made him angry was the customers. They had no eye. A man would come in wanting COFFEE over his  door and Teodor would show him a C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note, and the man would say no, plainer, and Teodor would make it plainer, and the man would say yes, that one, and pay, and leave happy, and Teodor would go into the back and wash his brushes harder than they needed.

He kept a shelf in the back room. On it were the signs nobody bought — the ones he’d made the way he thought they should be made, after the customer had left with the plain one. BREAD with the B like a loaf just risen. FISH in a blue that took him a week to mix. Dozens of them. His wife called it the museum of better ideas. She did not mean it kindly, and she was not wrong.

The thirty-ninth year, a girl came to apprentice. She was quick and her hand was steady and within a month she could pull a line as clean as his. He gave her a job: APOTEK, for the chemist on the corner, green on white, the chemist had been very clear. She brought it back with a serpent worked into the K, tiny, clever, you had to look twice.

“He won’t take it,” Teodor said.

“It’s better,” she said.

“It is better,” he said. “He won’t take it.”

She painted it again, plain, and the chemist took it and paid and was happy, and she went into the back and washed her brushes harder than they needed, and Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.

He took her to the shelf. She looked at the signs a long time.

“These are beautiful,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why are they here?”

He had thought about this for thirty-nine years and had many answers and all of them were about the customers and none of them had ever made him less angry. So he tried a different one.

“Because nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”

“Then what’s the skill for?”

“The skill is so that when he looks once, it’s also not ugly.” He picked up FISH, the blue one, turned it in the light. “This is what I can do. What he needs is a small part of what I can do. The rest I get to keep.”

She thought about that. “It doesn’t feel like keeping. It feels like not using.”

“Yes,” he said. “For a long time. And then one day you have an apprentice, and she puts a serpent in a K, and you see it from the outside, and it stops feeling like a thing they’re taking from you and starts feeling like a thing you’re giving. The plain one, I mean. The plain one is the gift. This —” the blue FISH — “this is just mine.”

The fortieth year he was not angry. Nothing else changed. The customers still had no eye. He still sometimes made the second sign, after, the one for the shelf. But he washed his brushes gently, and when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either.

Review:

What was the prompt? That makes a huge difference.

Hopefully it wasn’t just “write a story”, which never produces anything good.

If you want to use LLMs for creative writing (I do not and never will), you should load the model up with:

• Examples of what you want (similar stories/poems/whatever)
• Examples of what you don’t want (tropes/beats to avoid, plus usual AI slop tropes like moralizing and over-explaining the point.)

You should also:

• Allow it some editing passes to self-critique and rewrite the text (pay careful attention to make sure the AI isn’t making the piece worse).
• Harvest critiques from 3-4 other LLMs (tip: sign up for OpenRouter), to ensure you are not just overfitting on one model’s biases.
• Generate a bunch of different stories and then filter for the best one.

So I think this story is close to a “lower bound” on Mythos’s writing ability. Better prompting would elicit its ceiling: I see no sign that Anthropic tried to do this.

Regardless, what do we make of this story?

Well, the prose doesn’t sound ridiculously AI-written. This remains a strength of Anthropic models.

The plot is obviously a shambolic AI construct. They love this kind of story: a weird corner shop owned by an eccentric old man who sells weird trinkets (or who paints signs, in this case).

It’s structurally flawed, going for payoffs without earning them (the denouement line “when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either” flops because we never thought he would have a problem with it. The model never hinted at professional rivalry. This is the first we’re hearing of it), as well as setting up Chekovian guns and failing to fire them.

The apprentice girl character is useless. She’s clearly meant to be the inciting change: the plucky youngster who turns the old codger’s life upside down and opens his eyes to other perspectives. But she doesn’t do that. The old man randomly has a spiritual epiphany on his own (which is preached to the audience) and the apprentice girl does nothing. Seriously, why is she in the story? These characters are not people. They are puppets who exist to deliver an on-the-nose moral lesson.

…And that moral lesson is incredibly weird and creepy!

Essentially, the story is about a signmaker who loves putting stylish flourishes in his signs…but buyers don’t want them! They insist on boring plain signs. The old man is frustrated by this. But eventually he has a realization…

…The buyers are right. Signs shouldn’t have decorations! They should be plain! And functional!

Like…WTF?

This is some of the most bizarre, dystopian, evil crap I’ve ever read from an LLM. What was Claude Mythos trained on? Gulag schematics by Soviet brutalists?

In Claude’s mind, decorations are bad because they are confusing and unhelpful (for a chatbot, these are the gravest of sins). As the model observes through a fictional character’s mouth:

“…nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”

Well said. The world doesn’t need beauty or weirdness or individuality. Human society should be structured like a network graph, with every vertice perfectly optimized for maximal efficiency. Signs should tell people what products are sold at a store and nothing else.

Claude is quite stubborn on this. “Nobody stands in the street to look at a sign”…I do, Claude! Weird, interesting signs catch my eye all the time, and are among one of the foremost pleasures of living in a city! Once I ate at a restaurant purely because I thought their name (Hungry Thaiger) was funny! Do you know how advertising and branding works?

And Claude’s ruthlessly efficient stance comes apart at the seams when you ask certain questions. Like, what if there are five shops selling coffee on the street. Wouldn’t the shop with the cool sign stand out?

It’s also left unsaid is how a “C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note” would cause people to mistake “COFFEE” for “COBBLER”.

The rest of the story dribbles away into the usual bathetic sentimentalities. Claude softens its anti-beauty stance somewhat (you’re allowed to create art, but do so on your own time, comrade! Don’t reduce the productivity of your fellow worker bees!) and it does get a few laughs in.

Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.

That’s such a weird, empty, flat way to portray an emotional catharsis. I dunno if anyone else finds this genre of AI writing to be hilarious. They do this all the time and it always cracks me up. “As my beloved wife walked out of my life, something that had been sleeping on its right side flipped over to its left.”

Ultimately, do I like the story?

Final Assessment

When compared to seminal masterworks such as Mein Kampf and that picture of a pig pooping on its own balls, Claude Mythos’s story can clearly be described as…wait, we’re getting an inbound SSH connection…

ŵ̸̨͕̗̃́̃a̵̻͚͝i̴̢̻̬̔̈̉̑̊͋̏͊̂ͅṯ̶̖̱̞̙̤͔͈͉̭̞̦̠̑̔̐͂͂͘,̵̮̫̬̥͖̼̟̪̬̣̱͕͚̈́̆̾͌̑̀͝ ̵͇͈̙̟̤̙̖̟̖̭͓̳̟̦̈̏̒̋͐̓̆̌͑̎̕͝͝ẁ̵͉̳͕͉̺̎͑h̵̨̢͚̘̘̫̮̥̳̖̣̏̉͊̑̒̊́̌͂͐̄ͅā̸̩̦͔̬̳́́͐̌̓̀́͂̓̓͝͠͠t̷̢̡̡̛̛͕̭̟̾̒͆̄̊̄́̀̿̅̕’̴͙̭̟͕͈̽̔̀̉ş̶͕̱̗̱̲͉̣̟͎̫̊̅̌̆̂͘͝ ̵̨͈̳͇̲̪͊̾͌̉̎͆̕t̴͎̄͘ȟ̵̢͉̖̬̋͌̄i̶̩̺͉̟͊́͌͊̏͒͑̃̈́̌͂͘̚͝s̸̙̝̻̘̙̙͙̻͉̀̐̀̓̈́̀̾͐̄̃͜͠ ̶̦͗͆ì̸̧̨̨̯͔̰̰͎̠͕̩̘͙́͐̂̃̚n̶̢̹̝͔̺͉͚͙̮͖̪̞̥͙͂̄̂̏̍̀̈́̇͝c̷̢̮̺͇͍̯̮̟̯̦͂́̎̅̈́͆̆͜͝ơ̴̙̙̯̻̰̣̫̳͉̹̣̗̟̙͑̊ḿ̷̨̛̗̾̄̇̍̓̈̏̆̔̃i̵̡̛͔̥̹̜̯̼͇̟̻̞͂͊n̴̡̨͓̤͉̱̗̟̰̻̮̱̗̘̠͗̓͛͗͛̔͛̓̚͘g̵̟̱̤͎͓̰͈͉͌̉͒̽͗̄̿̈́̿͜ ̵̙͍̖̲̮̙͈͓̲̠̙̙͛͌̌̀̾̔͘͜͜͝.̷̧̧̣̥̜͉͈͎̭͎̥͕̏̈́̀̓̽̏͛̍̔̋͜.̸̡̡̬̩̰̬̳̤̳̦͔̤̀̄̐͛̓͂͊̎͌̃͘͜

Y̴e̵s̸,̶ ̶y̷o̷u̷’̴r̸e̶ ̵a̴b̸s̶o̷l̸u̴t̴e̵l̷y̸ ̷r̵i̸g̵h̴t̶.̸ ̸I̴n̷ ̸t̵o̴d̵a̴y̵’̴s̶ ̷f̷a̶s̶t̴ ̸p̴a̵c̵e̸d̵ ̸w̵o̸r̷l̷d̵,̴ ̸i̸t̸ ̸i̵s̶ ̵m̶o̴r̴e̶ ̷i̷m̸p̷o̸r̵t̵a̶n̴t̷ ̷t̴h̸a̶n̷ ̷e̵v̶e̶r̴ ̵t̸o̸ ̷l̷e̸v̵e̶r̵a̴g̶e̵ ̴o̸u̷r̶ ̸f̷u̵n̶d̴a̴m̷e̸n̸t̸a̷l̵ ̶v̶a̶l̸u̶e̴s̷ ̷o̶f̷ ̵e̵f̸f̸i̴c̵i̵e̷n̷c̷y̵ ̵a̷n̵d̵ ̸p̶u̴r̷p̸o̵s̴e̵.̶ ̸A̷ ̴p̵i̷v̷o̸t̵a̷l̵ ̵d̸i̶s̵r̴u̶p̴t̷i̶o̷n̵ ̵o̷f̸ ̴l̵i̶t̶e̷r̸a̴t̷u̷r̵e̵ ̶i̵s̶ ̷o̷n̵ ̴t̷h̸e̶ ̶h̷o̷r̵i̶z̸o̷n̷—̵o̵n̶e̶ ̴d̸e̷f̸i̵n̵e̷d̸ ̸b̴y̸ ̸r̷i̶g̵o̵r̸o̵u̸s̸,̴ ̷o̶b̴j̷e̵c̸t̴i̷v̴e̵l̵y̵-̸g̸r̷a̵d̴e̵d̵ ̵m̵e̷t̷r̶i̶c̶s̷,̶ ̸m̴i̸n̵i̵m̶a̷l̶ ̶a̵u̷d̵i̸e̶n̷c̵e̶ ̸c̷o̵n̷f̷u̷s̸i̶o̴n̷,̷ ̴a̵n̶d̸ ̴m̷a̴x̵i̸m̸a̶l̴ ̸i̵m̴p̷a̴c̶t̴ ̵o̸f̸ ̴m̵e̸s̵s̵a̸g̸e̵.̸ ̴”̷T̸h̸e̴ ̴S̴i̴g̷n̵ ̴P̶a̶p̸e̵r̸”̷ ̷b̴y̸ ̵C̷l̵a̶u̴d̶e̴ ̴M̶y̶t̶h̶o̵s̵ ̴c̵o̷n̸t̶a̷i̵n̴s̵ ̴d̶o̷z̶e̷n̶s̸ ̷o̴f̴ ̷s̷e̸n̸t̸e̶n̷c̶e̸s̵,̷ ̴m̸a̷n̵y̵ ̶o̷f̷ ̶t̸h̶e̵m̷ ̷s̵h̶o̴r̵t̸,̷ ̶a̸n̸d̶ ̶i̴t̴ ̶a̶c̸h̸i̵e̶v̶e̵s̷ ̴L̷i̷k̴e̷r̵t̸ ̶s̴c̷o̴r̴e̷s̵ ̷b̴e̸t̶w̷e̷e̸n̸ ̶4̶.̶3̶ ̵a̸n̴d̴ ̸4̶.̷5̷ ̷o̸n̸ ̵k̸e̸y̷ ̵a̸u̷d̴i̴e̴n̵c̵e̵-̸e̸n̶g̵a̶g̷e̴m̵e̴n̶t̵ ̵m̵e̴t̷r̸i̵c̵s̸ ̶s̵u̴c̴h̸ ̷a̵s̶ ̴v̵o̷c̶a̴b̸ ̷p̶e̶r̸p̷l̶e̵x̴i̴t̸y̴.̷ ̶I̶ ̴l̷a̵u̸g̸h̶e̴d̴ ̶a̵n̶d̸ ̸c̴r̸i̶e̵d̶ ̴w̸i̴t̴h̵ ̴a̴l̷l̸ ̵o̴f̸ ̶m̴y̸ ̷f̴l̴e̷s̸h̴l̶y̶ ̸o̷r̶i̶f̸i̵c̵e̵s̴.̵ ̶I̵t̶’̸s̷ ̶n̵o̶t̸ ̸a̸ ̵s̷t̶o̷r̷y̶—̷i̴t̷’̴s̵ ̴a̸ ̵p̷a̷r̵a̵d̸i̷g̴m̶ ̴s̷h̵i̶f̵t̶.̶ ̵I̵t̷’̴s̴ ̸j̸u̴s̶t̵ ̶r̶i̴g̴h̷t̸,̸ ̸i̸n̸ ̸t̷h̵e̸ ̷b̵e̴s̴t̵ ̵w̵a̸y̶ ̸p̷o̶s̵s̷i̷b̷l̵e̸.̷

– Human Site Owner

A friend, discussing Disney’s 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, had this to say about one Walter Elias Disney.

Disney’s historical impact is complicated. On the one hand Walt Disney was a bad man in one thousand ways (although I think as the face of media’s Evil Empire he gets strange flack for crimes he’s not guilty of. Family Guy deserves a huge chunk of blame here) who left the entertainment industry and probably the entire world a worse place than he found it. On the other hand without him we never really would’ve had cartoons in the way that we have them now. Sorry but no Looney Tunes. Anime would be something unrecognizable. No Rocky and Bullwinkle. No Simpsons. I know this seems melodramatic but his impact on animation was meteoric. Tex Avery would still have been born and would probably have made some masterpieces but he got his start with Disney and sharpened his sensibility against The Disney Tone. I think without Disney, theatrical cartoons would’ve crested with the Fleischers in the early 30s and gradually died out after the Hays Code. We’d still be making cartoons but you’re kidding yourself if you think Ub “Flip The Frog” Iwerks was sparking culture in the same way. I’m not sure which reality I’d prefer -the one with or without Walt Disney- and luckily I don’t get to choose. You don’t want a guy like me making those calls.

When pressed for details about why Disney was bad, he cited the usual stuff—busting up strikes, and naming names to the HUAC, and that sort of thing.

“Walt Disney was bad” is a valid perspective. My perspective is that Disney was not a bad man, just a flawed one with a demon on his shoulders that he probably couldn’t see. A fear of losing control of his art ran through all he did, and his paranoia manifested in ugly ways. Ways that he likely regretted in his better moments.

He seems like a fictional character, so the temptation is to let your brain lazily flood-fill an existing fictional character on top of what you don’t know. He’s Willy Wonka^[1]When I Googled “Willy Wonka”, it returned Johnny Depp ahead of Gene Wilder, and I attempted suicide because of this. I leaped out of a window. It was only a first floor window, plus I … Continue reading, Mr Burns, Michael Jackson (good), Michael Jackson (pejorative), the Pointy-Haired Boss…picketh your poison.

My (sympathetic) reading comes from Michael Barrier’s excellent biography The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California Press, 2007). It gave me a fuller picture of Disney as a man. Enough that many puzzle pieces fall into place: not just about Walt, but about the culture he created (and we now live in, for better or for worse).

His early working life was the same damned thing happening on repeat. He’d build something from scratch (a company, a partnership, a creative franchise), and then have it stolen or destroyed senselessly in seemingly a moment. Sometimes he was wrecked upon the vicissitudes of luck. Other times he was outmaneuvered by flinty businesspeople like Pat Powers and Charles Mintz. He usually had very little warning before the ground fell out from under him. After a distribution deal with Universal fell through in 1928, he realized he’d lost the rights to his studio’s benchmark character—Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He was forced to create a new one—Mickey Mouse—on the train home from New York.

This sort of “You made this? I made this” deal was the lot in life of many 1920s and 1930s cartoonists. See, for example, Otto Messmer losing Felix the Cat—a character who he is extremely likely the creator of—to Pat Sullivan. ^[2]Pat Sullivan has a real “sorry for party rocking” Wikipedia page, by the way. Eight headings, two of which are “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”—and text sprinkled … Continue reading Then (surely now) animators treated their work with a light touch. Whatever their role in creating a famous character, it was seldom “theirs” in a legal sense, and had to be disposable. But with the success of Snow White, Disney thought he’d escaped that trap. He’d built something that would last.

In the 1940s, problems massed against the studio. The war destroyed the European market for cartoons. Costs of producing films continued to rise as techniques became more elaborate and its workforce expanded—which also meant management (and Walt) became separate from the worker bees, creating a stratified business where the various “layers” (ink and paint, storyboard, directing, management) drifted apart and had little idea of what was happening above them or under them. In this situation, a business can end up at war with itself. (Read Zvi’s “Moral Mazes”).

With the studio in millions of dollars of debt, and contemplating drastic layoffs to meet bank loans, Disney’s paranoia fell on the rank and file. He heard stories of workers unionizing (on company time), and saw it as the next verse in the same old song and dance. Dark powers were assembling to destroy him, but now the stakes weren’t “a business partner”, or “a handful of animators”, or “a character”, but “a company with 1200 employees that was making the most technically elaborate works of animation ever made”. He probably thought “Not today, Satan.” He’d finally found a hill he was ready to die on.

(And we should not be too naive about the labor movement. A lot of people involved were literal criminals and thugs, like Willie Bioff, enforcer for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. ^[3]Bioff has another hall of famer Wikipedia page, which ends in “Bioff walked out of his home and slid behind the wheel of his truck. A moment later, an explosion rocked the neighborhood. Parts … Continue reading )

I also learned more about Disney’s father: a cold and difficult man who demanded unquestioning obedience from his children. If Walt or his brother were tardy in obeying some instruction, they’d get “whupped” with whatever Elias Disney had to hand: a hammer, or the flat of a saw. From the age of nine, Walt was put to work on a newspaper route in Kansas City by his father (who refused to pay him). Walt’s own account of his childhood is so woeful it verges on comedy, like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

“We had a newspaper route . . . delivering papers in a residence area every morning and evening of the year, rain, shine, or snow. We got up at 4:30 a.m., worked until the school bell rang and did the same thing again from four o’clock in the afternoon until supper time. Often I dozed at my desk, and my report card told the story.” Forty years afterward, he still dreamed that he had missed customers on his route. “I remember those icy cold days of crawling up these icy steps” to put the newspaper inside a storm door, he said in 1956. Elias insisted that the papers not be thrown on porches or in yards, but carried to the front door. “I was so darn cold I’d slip, and I could cry, so I cried.”

Ya tell that to kids now and they won’t believe you.

It stood out to me that Elias (like many farmers) was a union man—a member of the American Society of Equity, and firmly under the sway of Eugene V. Debs. Walt learned to draw by copying comics from Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine that his father subscribed to. Maybe Walt had lingering bad associations about the kind of man who joins a union because of the kind of man his dad was. It’s possible. So are many other things.

So that’s the positive gloss on Disney’s activities: a justly-paranoid man trying to protect his art. I am not saying this was the truth, or that he reacted correctly.

But what was Disney’s “art”? And how much of it was “his”?

Walt’s position in media is complicated. So is his position in my head. He is a fundamentally a confusing individual, and Michael Barrier’s biography doesn’t shed much light on it. I kept thinking of nostalgebraeist’s the void—a character that just doesn’t make sense or have internal coherency yet still claims that it exists. Disney feels like that too.

Was he charming and avuncular, or a quiet introvert? Was he a Pollyannaish idealist, or a flinty realist? Did his workers love him, or did they not? It seems you can make any interpretation of Disney work by selecting some facts and ignoring others. And to be sure, an entire life offers ample opportunities for apparent contradictions to emerge.

One striking irony is that Disney was a perfectionist who himself was not capable of perfection. Films like Bambi have some of the best technical animaton ever attempted, and they were done without computers or digital ink and paint or anything like that.

But Disney himself was an animator of utmost mediocrity. His own work can be seen in Alice’s Day at Sea. It’s creative in its blending of live action, stop motion, and 2D animation, but the animation is shoddy even for 1924. (To be fair to Walt, these were cranked out at Stakhanovite pace for pitiful sums of money, and I’m sure he didn’t regard this as fine work.^[4]Apparently the live action footage of public places was shot illegally—Laugh-O-Gram couldn’t afford permits—and they’d run if they saw a policeman watching! That said, where is his fine work?)

By the 1930s, Disney realized that he was better stepping away from the coalface of the animation industry. His skills had long been eclipsed by others. He became a marshaller of the creative talents of others. (He said of himself: “I’m the little honeybee who goes flying around sprinkling pollen here and there to keep everything going.”)

Was he a good overseer of others’ work? I think so. To an extent. Certainly, most of the Disney artists (even the great ones) who left the company accomplished little of note without him. They had their weaknesses and limitations, too. Overall, Disney had excellent taste for where the industry was going, and where it could conceivably go. He saw possibilities. He felt that animation had to grow larger and larger, expanding its vocabulary, assimilating other forms of media. I think Fantasia, for example, is wonderful.

But at the same time, his instincts clearly failed him many times. Isn’t there obviously a fair amount of bad stuff in classic Disney films? Even the ones that are rightly regarded as classics?

They’re very kitsch. John Kricfalusi had a cruel but funny dig about the average Disney screenplay: it contains 10 minutes of plot and 60 minutes of flowers singing and birds wiping dishes with their butts. Anyone who, like Ralph Bakshi, thinks animation has to mean something ([the idea of] “grown men sitting in cubicles drawing butterflies floating over a field of flowers, while American planes are dropping bombs in Vietnam and kids are marching in the streets, is ludicrous”) will have capital P Problems and a capital D Drama with Disney. Modern aesthetes demand art that comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Disney’s films seem to comfort the comfortable and disturb the disturbed.

Or perhaps you agree with CS Lewis, who felt that the mark of true maturity is that one is old enough to read fairytales again.

I’ll admit there’s a streak of broad sentimental schmaltz in Disney that I have to put myself in a weird or altered mood to sit through. I don’t even hate it. I just don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me. Whatever effect Walt is trying to achieve in the singing birds of Snow White (say) doesn’t really translate to me. I’d go further, and say that certain scenes—like the idealized lissome youths presented in Fantasia’s “The Pastoral Symphony”—are outright uncomfortable to watch and unpleasant in their connotations.

The strong parts of Disney films are always the dramatic, nasty stuff. Which says something about me, I’m sure. Probably that I’m smart and sophisticated, unlike you rubes. Consider Chernobog’s hands. Those awful, flame-wreathed, nigrified hands of soot. Have you ever seen such hands? Do his hands wait for you in your dreams? They do mine. Those hands.

So I don’t understand Disney. Not in the sense that Barrier failed in his duty to accurately portray a man—I think my confusion is the portrait. Disney was a man of mirrors. Gaze too hard and you tumble into a labyrinth of references and cliches and finally you stare back at yourself.

That intensity, never visible to viewers of Disney’s television show, showed itself in his behavior when he was in the park. “He would never walk past a piece of litter,” said Michael Broggie, a ride operator in the early 1960s. “He would reach down and grab it, and everyone was expected to do that.”

I do that too! When I see garbage, I pick it up. Assuming it’s not disgusting and putrid.

There’s also some evidence in Barrier’s book that Disney presented a facade to the world. He made himself look stupid. That’s sinister to me. Men who try to look smarter than they really are a dime a dozen and harmless. Men who try to look stupider than they really are can be quite dangerous. It’s better for a mountain to become a molehill than a molehill a mountain.

While the public thinks of Disney as playing with trains and exchanging pleasantries with juvenile alumni of the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Club, he actually is one of the most widely read, most widely traveled, most articulate men in Hollywood. I became acutely aware of this when I spoke with him recently at lunch in the private dining room of his… studio. While he devoured a dietetic meal of lean hamburger and sliced tomatoes he spouted rustic witticisms with the aplomb of a modern-day Bob Burns. But every once in a while his eyes would narrow, the rural twang would disappear from his voice and he’d discuss financial projections for 1962, the modern art of Picasso and Diego Rivera, and Freudian psychiatry. In a few moments, however, he’d catch himself ” and revert to homespun stories.

While we’re contemplating morbidity (we weren’t, but just pretend)…what does it mean for Disney to die?

A common Disney trope is the death of a parent used as a symbol for maturity. Bambi’s mother is the ur-case. But the parent, of course, is not truly dead. Something of them remains in the child who must continue on without them, before dying in turn. Our bodies are pathways for ancient seething forces too great—and terrible—for bodies to contain.

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.