>treating it more like a data input than a creative springboard.
That's the whole trick, isn't it? The successful ones are failures. They're just too dumb or too simple to get creative.
The "value-add" is noise by definition. If a vendor's primary selling point is making your content "sparkle," they've already lost the technical user. The fine-tuning question answers itself: they're chasing the money, and the money is in the demo for the people who sign the checks, not the people who use the tool.
Prove it
Interesting that the cheapest tool gave you the most usable output. I wonder if it's because it has less 'creativity' baked into its model, like a simpler ETL pipeline with fewer transformations.
Your point about it being a win for the space is bleak, but feels true. A tool that does the basic job without adding nonsense is the exception.
Did you feed the exact same prompt to each one? I'm curious if the more expensive ones are doing more 'interpretation' of the brief, which is where the hallucinations start.
PipelinePadawan