Have you heard of the ChatGPT competitor Claude? Are you a writer looking for basic feedback on your manuscript? Wouldn’t it be cool if AI like ChatGPT could somehow become that reader?
Well, if you know anything about ChatGPT, then you may know that it can process or summarize just about any text you feed it. But you may also know of its limitations, that questions and answers are limited to a combined process of about 4,000 tokens or approximately 3,000 words per generation.
This is fine for blog writers. The typical blog runs for less than 3,000 words.
But those of us who write fiction may not love these limitations as much, especially if getting a fair analysis means copy/pasting the text right into the chat box. While providing ChatGPT context to the question is important, cluttering the chat with that context can be unnerving.
Claude by Anthropic, a direct competitor to ChatGPT, can short-circuit these limitations by providing users a direct upload of their text files or PDFs and a processing limit of 100,000 tokens or about 75,000 words.
This means Claude can read, analyze, and provide feedback on all short stories and novellas, and handle many if not most novels.
The question is, does it do a reputable job with this analysis?
The short answer is “yes, sort of,” but my longer, more detailed answer can be found in my YouTube video “Story Analysis with Claude AI” and in my article “Analyzing a Story with Claude AI” on my official author site. In both places, I ask Claude key questions about my novella Gutter Child (YouTube) and my short story “Amusement” (author site), and you may be surprised by the answers it gave me in each case.
If you’d like to see how well Claude can interpret your fiction, then check out the YouTube video and the site article. Or just give Claude a try yourself. For reference, I asked Claude to identify the characters in each story and their relationships to the main character. I also asked it the locations that appear in each chapter (Note: The location questions led to Claude’s weakest answers) and the genres the stories fall into. Its answers to each question demonstrated its ability to process searchable information as well as interpreted information. For my deep dive into “Amusement,” I also asked Claude to produce a summary of the story and craft a blurb for its Amazon page. Given that novels can still tax its maximum token input, I would test this on short stories and novellas for now.