I have a confession. While experimenting with AI over the last year, I wondered what would happen if I crammed an unfinished novel draft, one I actually care about, into Claude. Claude is pitched as the LLM for writers, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 3 Opus widely regarded as the premier LLMs for writers, including creative writing, long-form content and human-like prose. Meanwhile, I majored in English and work in mass communications, so I’m trained to think about writing creatively, strategically and tactically. Writing and personal expression have been part of my daily life for most of my life. If this tool could in fact produce a quality story, someone like me should be able to make it happen. Instead, the experience left me confident that AI isn’t a good vehicle for creative, narrative writing.

Here’s what I found:

On the technical side, Claude struggled to maintain a narrative thread over time. The longer the chat, the more the bot drifted and eventually lost track of details and claims made about characters earlier in the plotline. It’s not a sustainable approach for narrative writers because continuity matters: outsource too much plotline to the bot and your characters lose relationship to one another.

LLMs like Claude work fine for writing support—they can function something like a synonym machine, helping writers work through technical questions of redundancy, register, length, and other semantic needs while drafting. But when you outsource world-building and meaning-making to an LLM, it becomes narratively confusing fast. Despite giving Claude extensive background on my primary characters and the world they live in, it would confidently declare that a character’s relationship to another was X, then claim the opposite on the next page. Dialogue was thin and expository. It preferred a sort of “maid and butler” style of dialogue where two characters artificially recap shared knowledge for the reader. Meanwhile Claude does not do feelings well, which is arguably the point of much narrative writing.

Ultimately my drafts were worse off than what I started with – less organized, more confusing, with so much narrative drift that almost nothing was usable, even as a first draft. A devil’s advocate might argue that my prompting wasn’t sophisticated enough to produce the results I wanted. Sure.

But then we have the second problem: Claude’s approach to storytelling isn’t narratively interesting. Fiction and narrative writers put tremendous energy into world-building and sensory experiences. The goal is to immerse the reader in a sensory experience so total that they can experience another world entirely – the original VR, if you will. A great writer even exploits your higher-level cognitive functions by reusing parts of the brain that evolved for action and perception, which is why a good story makes you think, feel, and wonder.

Claude does not feel or wonder. Claude collates.

A key part of this essay suggests that LLMs create meaning through triangulation – that by pinging other ideas and vocabulary, an LLM can get a human reader close, or close enough, to suffice in many cases of writing. In my experience, this is true enough in business writing, where tinkering with approach and register can become as important as precise verbiage.

But this misses the pleasure and the point of good storytelling, which is myriad but usually centers on the satisfaction of expanding your imagination and experience through narrative, by seeing your own messy, striving, failing, hopeful, and collective human experience reflected in another person’s expression. That kind of meaning-making doesn’t happen through triangulation. It happens through the labor of human thought, experience and skilled articulation. That’s art, babes.

This article gets into the mess of AI and creative writing, within the domain of the romance genre, which famously cranks out variations on romance themes at a rapid clip. It drills down into some of the debates about writing, authority and authorship in relationship to LLMs that are playing out across the publishing sector now. Remember: early research suggests that most writers who use LLMs as part of their workflow ultimately retain their sense of authorship in and around the tools, suggesting that even when writers adopt AI assistance, they still see themselves, not the tool, as the creative and accountable source. So based in my experience above, I suspect that if an AI approach to creative writing is successful, it’s because the author is linking her approach to emerging tech, not because the work is good, and that’s a difference worth distinction.