Fiction Eval leaderboard · genre
Best AI model for romance writing
July 2026 — scores recomputed using only the romance 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 62% of re-runs. This romance-only sample is small, so treat the exact order as rough and check where the ranges overlap before reading much into close neighbors.
| # | Model | Romance score (likely range) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1746 (likely 1677–1817) |
| 2 | Claude Opus 4.8 | 1729 (likely 1664–1790) |
| 3 | Grok 4.3 | 1650 (likely 1589–1710) |
| 4 | GLM 5.2 | 1577 (likely 1500–1646) |
| 5 | Gemini 3.1 Pro | 1492 (likely 1415–1571) |
| 6 | DeepSeek V3.2 | 1326 (likely 1260–1400) |
| 7 | Mistral Large | 1326 (likely 1257–1404) |
| 8 | Llama 4 Maverick | 1155 (likely 1100–1239) |
Claude Sonnet 4.6 on the romance turn scene
The inventory had to be done by morning, and Reyes had locked them both in. Mara set another box on the folding table. Marcus didn't look up from his clipboard. The fluorescent light above them had been flickering for twenty minutes and neither of them had mentioned it. "Twelve boxes of the archive files," she said. "I have eleven." "Count again." He counted again. "Twelve." She pulled the next box. He made the mark. Outside, the building had gone completely quiet—the cleaning crew, the last of the associates, everyone gone home. The clock on the wall said 11:40. "You always do that," Marcus said. "Do what." "Say *count again* before I've even had a chance to—" He stopped. Made another mark. Mara lifted a box that was heavier than it looked and found her footing before she'd quite found her footing. She didn't drop it. Marcus had half-risen from his stool, one hand out, and when she steadied he sat back down and looked at his clipboard like it had …
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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