A Confederacy of Models: a Comprehensive Evaluation of LLMs on Creative
  Writing
Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez Paul Williams
We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging
and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a
difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic
narration of a single combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl,
a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several LLMs and humans to write such a
story and conduct a human evalution involving various criteria such as fluency,
coherence, originality, humor, and style. Our results show that some
state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our writers in
most dimensions; whereas open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in
creativity, while humor shows a binary divide between LLMs that can handle it
comparably to humans and those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and
limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.