Article URL: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/ai-music-video-arena-claude-vs-gpt-5.6 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48939524 Points: 67 # Comments: 58

We gave Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol the same song, a budget, web search, and local ffmpeg, then let each autonomously direct a music video. We built a small agentic harness with one job: hand a model a song, a hard dollar budget, and a set of tools, then get out of the way and let it produce a full music video on its own. The model researches which video models exist, generates clips, watches its own footage, edits with ffmpeg, and assembles a final cut. A few readers of our last build-off said they wanted to see how tool use actually varies between models, so we gave frontier-level models an open-ended, long-horizon task where each model decides on its own what to research, what to generate, and how to edit. We log every tool call, so you can see exactly how each one worked (full transcripts below). We ran two models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, each at two budgets ($25 and $100), for four runs total. Every run got the same song (Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk"), a short text description, and a time-stamped lyric transcript. Once the budget hits zero, paid generation is refused, but the model can keep editing. Every model message, tool call, charge, and error was logged. The whole harness is open source at github.com/hershalb/music-video-arena, so you can run it yourself. Each clip below is the model's final, self-assembled output.mp4, full length with the original song muxed in. All four runs finished on their own (none hit a step or time limit) and all four produced a valid, full-length video with the original song muxed in. "Generation spend" is the metered FAL cost, which is what the budget caps. At $25 both models nearly exhausted it. At $100 they spent $36.57 (Sol) and $48.60 (Fable), so more budget did translate into more footage. It does not include the cost of running the model itself, which we add below.