Humanistic reactions to Fable

Fable absolutely crushed all previous models in the dissertation benchmark. It took much longer to give comments, but the comments were vastly better and it handled follow-up conversation well. The comments are now better than what professors give outside of their expertise. Experts in their expertise still do better and it's not close. (And there are lots of ways in which human relationships can lead to more effective feedback, even when someone is out of their expertise.) But it is much more outrageous than it used to be to write philosophy without asking LLMs for notes. I find Fable a bit less grating to read: its responses feel a bit more like a neutral computer response and less like a machine trying to hit my dopamine buttons. If I ask Fable to walk me through a sentence of Plato's Greek relevant to my dissertation, it's a lot more useful than past models, but it slips back into "dopamine mode," insisting that every bit of grammar and syntax is doing breathtaking philosophical…