AI-assisted Writing, 2026-07 edition

The house style of frontier LLMs still seems rather obnoxious at times, which I particularly noticed with GPT-5.5 in Codex. Anthropics new Fable 5 does best on the Creative Writing EQ-Benchmark (2229.6 score vs 2028.5 with GPT-5.5), but Ethan Mollick calls it “overwrought language” that cannot be prompted away: Peter Gostev confirms limited steerability for GPT-5.6 too: “Sol feels quite difficult…