Good at writing dialogue

From our own experience, creative writing can share a lot of characteristics with writing code. The expressiveness of the medium, and ambiguity on what makes "good" writing or code. We found Anthropic's Fable 5 to be somewhat lacking on the creative writing front, so we wanted to see how GPT-5.5 did on short-story writing.

Overall, ChatGPT 5.5 did a surprisingly good job at creative writing, producing well-paced dialogue that didn't stick out as stiff or overly mechanical. It adhered to common writing guidelines, such as avoiding dialogue tags, without needing to be told, it followed the prompt instructions well, and it injected a good amount of creativity into its responses.

Some of the prose it produced was a little tired, e.g.:

I tell myself the same story I told this morning. I tell it again because repetition gives a thing shape. If I say it often enough, the gaps stop looking like gaps.

...which reads oddly like a detective film noir narrator (which the prompt did not ask or hint for).

I think ChatGPT-5.5 can make a pretty good writing companion, but I don't think it would be capable of producing large amounts of cohesive, narratively interesting prose.