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Notes -
My own experience with using Claude or ChatGPT to comment/beta-read fiction is that its advice looks reasonable and thoughtful and as detailed as any developmental editor might provide, as in your example, but it turns out to be much the same no matter what you throw at it.
Telltale lines like "earns its premise" and "is doing real work." It will always pick some of your stuff and say things like that, then pick some other things and say "Where I'd push you" with phrases like "load-bearing moment" and "carrying too much weight."
Right now, I find AI story critique is really more like a tarot reading which might spark some things to think about, without taking any particular observation too seriously, rather than an actual critique from a reader that can really spot strengths and weaknesses.
[cw: links not appropriate for work. Probably more technical than erotic writing, but still probably not going to appeal to most readers here. ].
There's a definite tendency to give unfair and undue complements, and to hit certain cached phrases -- I keep hitting "harder and more honest", and I'd wish that were true, but it's probably just the equivalent of drawing The Tower.
But I've also had it push me from a silly and smutty pastiche of the Anthrostate into a dark and gritty exploration of the politics of responsibility and forgiveness, rape and benefiting one's own life from corrupt systems, along with reworking a side character into a concrete (if minor) villain. I'm not even sure I want to write that! It's a lot darker than I like to work, to the point where the smut doesn't quite fit anymore.
((I've also gotten direct advice from it on errors related to weight-lifting terminology and bashed for having a character insufficiently 'matter' as anything but reward, along with catching on an implied 'X Character Engineered This Encounter' and 'this specific scene that you stretched on is a bad fit for the story's tone', but that's from a really smutty and slightly gross work, so might not be useful as an example.))
That's still a procedural thing, even moreso than a Ouiji board: I've save-scummed a response a couple times to reword it either to get the directionality of answer I wanted. Some amount of what's helpful is just the extent it forces me to write out, in full sentences, what I'm thinking about, which gives the LLM a lot of what it's pushing on. Sometimes, yes, it's just not right, either because it doesn't get the connotations from the specific genre I'm working on, because it's missing a major story mark that a human would get, or just because it has different or random tastes.
((Both Opus and Grok will regularly twig on and oppose zeugma and I absolutely love them to the point of stretching it; Opus hates repeated anaphora, but Grok pushes it hard, and I've got mixed feelings.))
Still, maybe you get a lot higher a quality of beta reader than my genres do, but I've literally paid one before for more shallow feedback.
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Didn't realize I had PTSD for this phrase until seeing it outside of the ChatGPT app
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