I’ve never been terribly interested in flavours of the month. AI being one of them. None of us can avoid AI, of course. If you’ve searched for something on Google you’re using it already.

There are things about it I hate, naturally. The idea of using technology to create actual scenes of a book is simply appalling. Readers have every right to expect the work they’ve paid for was written by the person whose name is on the cover, not an algorithm. It also deprives an author of the real fun of creativity, which is inventing something out of nothing but your imagination and talent.

AI graphics are often really very easy to spot as fakes. Ask for an AI image about Venice and every cliché in the book comes out, along with versions of the Grand Canal that bear no resemblance to reality. And as for AI audiobook narration, give me a break. That’s a non-starter. Yes, I’m sure AI can copy individual voices pretty exactly. But good audiobook narrators do a lot more than read. They interpret, they perform, they get things out of your words you never knew were there in the first place. I can’t believe there’s an algorithm that can replace all that.

So I was happy to trudge along in a state of AI ignorance until I read an interview with Ian McEwan, of all people. He was raving about AI and, in particular, a tool called Claude. This is from Anthropic, the very people who are about to shell out $1.5 billion for ripping off books to train on their systems. So I thought, if it’s good enough for Ian McEwan, I’ll give Claude a try. After all, they should be sending me a cheque quite soon.

Here’s the truth. It’s quite remarkable. I won’t be going back to life before AI.

One of the tedious aspects of this business is the drudgery of it all. It’s there in research, finding material then filing it so that you can find it again. There too in proofreading, and there’s particular drudgery in spotting stupid errors like missing words and fouled-up punctuation. You can spend hours, days, weeks just going through really tedious routines that add nothing to the creative side of things but are just basic housekeeping. To my amazement, Claude is very good at taking a lot of that onerous labour off your hands.

With research, you type in a subject, and it goes out and finds material that would ordinarily take multiple different searches and sources after which you’d have to try to synthesise the results into something readable. Claude does that for you in seconds, understands plain English, and gives you the sources so you can check it out yourself. If your work involves a lot of research, that is a huge timesaver.

It can cast a careful eye over a chapter or a scene. Show it to Claude and it will spot those obvious mistakes you miss because you’re so familiar with the words: names that you’ve misspelled, punctuation that’s amiss, misplaced and absent words. Wrong character names and basic continuity slip-ups. All the little stuff that is very easy to miss when you’re reading your own work. This may sound daft but it’s a little bit like having your own personal assistant on hand 24/7.

There’s lots more besides. Want a name for a Bulgarian male character? Claude will offer you a selection in a flash. It can also solve issues with your website, write very convincing letters of complaint when something goes wrong with a contractor and give a pretty convincing Italian lesson too. Just today I was trying out a new camera which adamantly refused to connect by wifi to my phone. Nothing online I could find offered a solution, only lots of people with the same problem. Claude fixed it with a simple network tweak in seconds.

If you’re a user of Ulysses on the Mac there is a way of linking it to Claude so that Claude can read a scene and offer proofreading and other checks, posting them back into the Ulysses sheet using this free add-on ulysses-map. Setting it up is quite technical so the best way to do it is… ask Claude to handle the job. It’s a stretch too far for me. I just paste in text, either from Scrivener or Word which has much the same result. But I’m sure others will love it.

I find copying a scene into Claude a really useful way of checking for simple errors, seeing if I’ve left out something from the original synopsis, and spotting continuity issues against earlier scenes. I also use this to produce a new scene-by-scene synopsis to monitor how things are going and give me an easy reference back to earlier material. Writing a full-length novel involves keeping a lot of stuff in your head and my head doesn’t have the capacity it used to have after all these years.

I’m still learning and I’m very aware I’m not pushing it. Nor do I think this is somehow cheating. The words and the ideas are my own. Claude is no more responsible for them than a spellchecker deserves an author credit for correcting my typos.

One big caveat though. At the bottom of the screen it says, ‘Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses’. You need to do that. Claude does make mistakes, big ones sometimes. If something sounds a bit awry, challenge it and ask for confirmation and proof. I’ve done that often enough about curious results in research and Claude will come back and put up its hands and admit it got it wrong if you push it.

Like it or not, AI is here. Anything that can save an author from menial labour and give us more time to think or write is worthwhile in my book. Ian McEwan was right.

Here, if anyone’s interested, is the story bible for my work in progress. It works by linking Claude to Notion (a free account will do). Claude then automatically fills in all of the fields and entries. In Ulysses it can pull in your text direct from the app when you ask. Anything else and you’d paste your text in chapter by chapter. Then in around a minute or so you have a proper story bible for the your book at that point in time, and Claude will update everything as you continue to write. The original bible was put together using ChatGTP but I now use it with Claude. Feel free to do with it whatever you wish. If you want technical support please ask Claude not me!

Two final tips. Don’t get sucked in. Use it occasionally and don’t treat it as someone to chat to idly. As a fact checker it’s brilliant but it’s not an alternative editor and will remind you of that if it’s doing its job. Second, if you try Google Gemini and its associated Notebook app… good luck. I found it quite incomprehensible. But maybe that’s just me. Claude and a free Notion account seemed much better.

Download here or by clicking on the image.