Fiction Eval leaderboard · genre
Best AI model for progression fantasy writing
July 2026 — scores recomputed using only the progression fantasy scenes (84 blind matchups, three tries per model). small sample — treat as rough
Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads, and comes out ahead of #2 in 74% of re-runs. This progression fantasy-only sample is small, so treat the exact order as rough and check where the ranges overlap before reading much into close neighbors.
| # | Model | Progression Fantasy score (likely range) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1764 (likely 1672–1851) |
| 2 | Claude Opus 4.8 | 1714 (likely 1620–1804) |
| 3 | Grok 4.3 | 1651 (likely 1573–1733) |
| 4 | GLM 5.2 | 1564 (likely 1500–1626) |
| 5 | Gemini 3.1 Pro | 1507 (likely 1438–1573) |
| 6 | DeepSeek V3.2 | 1374 (likely 1301–1448) |
| 7 | Mistral Large | 1274 (likely 1204–1354) |
| 8 | Llama 4 Maverick | 1153 (likely 1098–1235) |
Claude Sonnet 4.6 on the progression beat scene
The elder's laughter was the worst of it. Not the public correction, not the demonstration performed on Kael's body like he was practice equipment, not even the forty students watching from the courtyard's edges. The laughter—bemused, almost fond, the way you'd laugh at a dog that kept sitting at the dinner table. "Two years at Ironroot Fourth," Master Deng said, releasing Kael's wrist. "The sect's longest stagnation in living memory. Perhaps cultivation simply isn't—" Kael stopped hearing him. Not from anger. That was the strange part. The anger had burned out somewhere around month eight; he knew its shape and limits. This was something else. This was the anger's skeleton, after the flesh was gone. Bare and structural and very, very cold. He felt his qi do something he had no framework for. Ironroot cultivation moved upward—everyone knew this, it was the first lesson, qi rising from the earth through the body's core, building pressure like groundwater finding a fissure. You climbed tiers by sustaining that pressure longer, harder, hotter. …
Read every model's take side by side on the board.
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The full 8-model board · the July 2026 report · all head-to-heads
How it works: every pair of models is judged blind on the same scene, with the passages'
order flipped so being shown first can't sway it, by GPT-5.4 — a family that isn't on the
board, so nobody scores their own side. Each score carries a likely range; overlapping ranges
are called a tie. Slop is scored separately by a fixed checklist, not an AI. Full board,
every prompt, and the FAQ: thebookfactoryai.com/board.
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