Confidence, Not Perplexity: A Better Metric for the Creative Era of LLMs

Abstract

Reference-free metrics like self-perplexity are strongly biased against creative text generation. We propose the Confidence Score (CS), derived from a model's output probability distribution, as a less biased alternative. Experiments on gpt-4o-mini show that while fluency-based metrics prefer novel responses in 0\% of cases on 99 creative prompts, our CS does so 19% of the time, a statistically significant difference (95% CI for difference: [11.1%, 27.3%]). We also show that CS effectively distinguishes between easy, medium, and hard tasks, confirmed by non-overlapping confidence intervals. The Confidence Score thus mitigates the creativity bias of traditional metrics while retaining their core evaluative strengths, offering a more balanced assessment for modern LLMs.