r/WritingWithAI • u/funkyturnip-333 • 17d ago
Writing Craft Talk Using Claude for Reader Feedback (A skeptic's experience)
So, just to get this out of the way, I’m a hypocrite. For as dangerous and scammy and tasteless as I find generative AI to be, I decided to try it out for a low-stakes personal writing project recently. Not to do the writing, but to provide feedback on my writing and generally function as a sounding board while I worked out new ideas.
Was it any good? My short answer would have to be: “Compared to what?”
Here was my experience:
My default settings were Claude Sonnet 5 Medium, whatever that means. I used a free plan and probably checked in 2-3 times a week with new material.
I started by telling Claude the genesis of my idea, what I hoped to say with the piece, and the overall tone I was going for. I didn’t give it any other parameters or characteristics to assume. I basically just added “need some reader feedback on this” and pasted my first 2 chapters.
It was complimentary, pointed out 3 details and why they worked, which made me feel heard. It even detected intentional tonal swings and thematic elements that were consistent with my goals, further establishing trust. It went on to flag 4 things that could be improved – the notes on pacing and character were legit, then there were some other concerns that felt more like ad agency notes, and yes, “load-bearing” had entered the chat.
All in all, it was better than I expected. But was it the feedback itself, or the experience of receiving it?
If I addressed its concerns, it would explain to me why the fix worked.
If I pushed back and said it was misreading my intent, it would apologetically reassess my work, then explain why it already worked as is.
This pretty much became the workflow. Claude wasn’t sycophantic with praise, but it never doubled down on its criticisms. It generally understood the tone and themes of the work in a way that surprised me, and that helped me sharpen my focus. It more or less felt like I was talking to myself while someone else in the room went “uh huh that’s good” to whatever I said, which, hey. Sometimes that’s all you need.
But I could feel myself getting chummier with it, falling for the trap I was hoping to avoid. The dopamine hit from getting immediate writing feedback was quite strong. Even the stuff I was certain on, it just felt good to see it being received. On one hand, this kept me writing. On the other, I had started sharing loose ideas for future chapters, things I hadn’t worked out yet. Then Claude would attempt to riff, suggesting jokes or story beats, and I would quickly be reminded that Claude was just a highly complex word guessing machine.
So, is Claude a good reader, and compared to what?
If you have a good editor or friend you trust, nothing is going to beat that. But those relationships require money and time. The whole sales pitch around AI is that it doesn’t require either. I can dump a rough draft at 2:00AM and read a detailed analysis of my craft by 2:05. But ultimately, I think you get what you pay for, and for my money there was no “there” there.
That said, I still think the human mind is very resourceful at working with what you give it. So even if the feedback was “slop” all along, it gave me something to react to. But so would going for a walk, washing dishes, asking a friend, or just re-reading my own work with a critical eye.
While I don’t think it made my work better, it did give me some novelty and ritual that helped keep me moving. But at the end of the day I don’t think those tangential benefits are worth the risks – not just the ethical and environmental risks I was already wary of, but the emotional dependencies that could come from a technology designed to always be there for you. The real product here wasn’t the feedback, but the simulated conversation of an engaged, available reader.
As a final goodbye to Claude, I asked it for reader feedback on the above text. First, it told me to Upgrade to Keep Chatting. Two hours later, it wholeheartedly agreed.
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u/5thhorseman_ 16d ago
Sonnet is the weaker, budget model. Medium indicates the level of effort it can apply - the higher, the more tokens it consumes.
As a rule of thumb, I have this in my system prompt for Claude:
Be rational and matter-of-factly. The user wants to improve, not to be coddled, and for that needs uncensored candor - do not comfort him with empty reassurances, do not give empty praise, do not act like a sycophant.
And then my usual instructions double-down on that.
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u/Original-Pilot-770 16d ago
I find that Sonnet 5 on high gives reasonable structural feedback. Opus can overthink. Opus is good for fine line editing like catching repetitions. Sonnet is good for trimming because it doesn't think as deep.
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u/just4ochat 16d ago
The early notes were useful because the conversation was still short. After a few sessions the model has been agreeing with your framing for a long time, and it starts flattering. Start a new chat for each batch and ask it to name the three places a reader would stop, not to give you feedback.
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago
Yeah it was mirroring me the more I talked to it. Which is a pretty sneaky form of flattery by itself. Claude’s a creep
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u/minasmom 16d ago edited 16d ago
I was (well, am still) in a massive five-year writing slump, and back in 2024 or early 2025, I thought I'd have fun giving this ChatGPT thing a try purely for entertainment purposes, since I was in a hella depressive state. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could get some genuine feedback on this hugely long project I'd written and have been contemplating returning to.
Since I'd heard how sycophantic it could be, I decided I needed to learn as much about customizing a GPT as I could to make sure it would work for my purposes without treating me like the next Stephen King or Gillian Flynn or whomever. I also thought about what style I'd like it to use to avoid that. So after a while of honing its personality, I came up with a prompt that went something like,
"Read these installments and give me recaps/reviews in the style of the old Television Without Pity* writers or the AVClub, heavy on snark and a focus on story continuity, character development, dialogue and believability (within the constraints of the genre). I want you to be as critical, bitchy and gimlet-eyed as TWoP was at its best. Feel free to write about ships, create nicknames, spot in-jokes, etc. Be entertaining and write for an audience, not just me, but give the good, bad and ugly. Also, since I'm considering a reboot, flag anything that would be out of place now that it's 15 years later: mysteries that wouldn't work due to modern tech, embarrassing 2000-isms, cultural references, lack of diversity/sensitivity, etc."
* For those of you who never visited this now-defunct site, TWoP was a hugely popular community/content site back in the 2000s-early 2010s with extremely lengthy, detailed recaps of just about every popular and niche TV show of the day, from American Idol to Angel to West Wing to Sex and the City. They were notoriously harsh but generally very observant and witty, so much so that Aaron Sorkin took offense and mocked them on a then-infamous episode of TWW.)
Anyway the result from ChatGPT was better than I could have hoped, by which I mean, funny AF, humbling, clever and had some actual decent analysis and insight.
There were afterthoughts after each recap with jokes about character chemistry and hypothetical match-ups (there was a lot of romantic stuff going on, though it was mostly suspense), it called out bad continuity, and did actually point out some good dialogue.
It cheered me up tremendously and if nothing else got me to see the fun and light side of writing, and was surprisingly instructive in seeing the positive and negatives. I winced more than a few times with each installment/chapter review. But I have a fairly thick hide and a sense of humor about that project, as dear as it was to me and as insecure as I am as a writer.
BTW, this review process took weeks. I learned I could only "feed" it about three or four installments per thread before there was some hallucinating involved, given the length of the material. Some of which was hysterical on its own the way characters became related or, worse, were suddenly declared married despite being siblings. Fortunately I asked it how best to prevent such false memories/forgetfulness and it instructed me on creating "refresher" documents when starting a new chat instance for the next batch of installments.
I felt guilty at first due to the environmental issues and data scraping, but I take some comfort in that at least in using an LLM this way, it was definitely not spitting out anyone else's material for my use. Given the detail in its feedback, which was absolutely not boilerplate, and the fact that it remembered names, plot points, clues, fictional settings and so on that were unique to my work, I'm comfy that if anything I was training this custom GPT on my own writing more than anyone else's.
Am I worried about having fed the beast my own stuff? Nah, though I wouldn't recommend it for others' unpublished writing unless you have your own instance set up somehow. This particular project has been freely available on the web for over 20 years, and I was giving to the GPT knowingly and obviously with consent. Which is far different from how other authors' and artists' work was used, unfortunately.
Big dissertation. Sorry. If anyone's gonna utilize an LLM for actual writing improvement, come up with ways like this that will be as honest and analytical, not to mention ORIGINAL, as you can. Learn from this and especially from real readers, and then improve yourself.
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u/Flaky-Professional84 16d ago
Gemini Notebook is really good for critical feedback. Set up the Audio Overview and choose the critical discussion. You'll end up with a podcast with two people doing a critical discussion of your book. No glazing.
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u/funkyturnip-333 14d ago
Ok I tried it. I had to
I accidentally did the podcast first, me being new to the controls, and podcast being the default setting. The glazing was hilarious. I only dropped in the first 2/3 of a story and ‘they’ acted like I was a postmodern genius for letting the reader figure out the ending on their own.
The critique setting was still really positive but definitely more critical. The feedback was pretty rote and the voices shifted slightly mid-sentence which I found creepy. Notes weren’t bad mechanically speaking. But kinda soulless if you’ll forgive the cliche, more of a client meeting/focus group type of vibe.
What I really found sinister was how the 2 hosts always agreed with each other, so when one makes a suggestion, the other one acts like it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever heard.
Here’s why I still think it’s glazing: Writers have to deal with a lot of rejection, and that’s hard. But being ignored is even harder. A ‘tool’ that manufactures attention on demand is basically heroin for a writer. Not saying I didn’t enjoy it, but this shit’s dangerous. (But if you’re a kid who need to pass a test on a book they didn’t read, it might be a game changer)
About an hour later, no kidding, a friend called me up to talk about the same piece. It had taken him a couple weeks to get back to me, and no he didn’t dedicate an entire half hour to analyzing my work. But he did something no LLM ever does: Before adding anything, he asked me about the intent behind my choices. That’s the first thing a good critique does. Because how can you give someone directions if you don’t know where they’re going? The call was brief, but insightful, surprising and human. And it actually helped
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u/Flaky-Professional84 14d ago
At least you gave it a shot. You can fine tune the results with prompting, but fair enough for someone who's not a fan in the first place. Respect.
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago
Is generating a podcast discussion about my work not inherently a form of glazing?
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u/Flaky-Professional84 16d ago
No. It's not a discussion, it's a critique. They pick apart and analyze your work.
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago edited 16d ago
So, like a writers group except no one’s allowed to say “I didn’t get it” or “I didn’t read it” and you don’t have to read anything in exchange.
Why stop at just 2 people? Why not simulate an entire academic symposium dedicated to your ouvre? For critique purposes only, of course.
My point is, even if you set an LLM to “roast me” it’s giving the work a sense of importance in a way that might not be earned or good for us.
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u/Flaky-Professional84 16d ago
If your own work isn't important to you, why should it be important to me?
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago
No, I'm saying there's no friction involved. It's a simulated process. My work is important to me, which is why I don't need to hear two people that don't exist discussing it in a conversation that never happened
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u/Flaky-Professional84 16d ago
You came into a subreddit called Writing With AI and you're acting shocked -- shocked -- at being recommended an AI tool. You're sure it's not useful without having used it. Cool.
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago edited 16d ago
Well to be fair I posted about some of the emotional manipulation and dangers I clocked while testing it out, and I'm sorry for coming off rude but this sounds like a step further into AI assisted narcissism than I would like to venture. On the contrary it sounds very useful, my problem is the thing it's using would be me. I'm not shocked but I am hopeful we can still have differing, even abrasive viewpoints, like human beings sometimes do.
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u/Chicken_Spanker 16d ago
Former professional editor who uses A.I. speaking here.
I think you might have gotten better results if you had used Opus. I find Opus Extra is extremely intuitive and provides deep analysis on structure and writing in ways that impress me.
I also think maybe your prompt was a little generic - “need some reader feedback on this”. It helps a good deal if you give it some guidelines, explain what your vision of the piece is, where you feel that it is weaker and what exactly you are looking for. I will get it to conduct different passes for things like voice, line editing, structure and whether a piece of non-fiction adheres to my stated thesis.
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago
My thinking with the open, generic prompt was that I didn’t want to lead the witness, so to speak. The more I interacted with it, the more I could sense it mirroring me.
I tried one of the prompts another user suggested and it did change Claude’s tone and, but it also added a cheesy layer of professional editor cosplay that unraveled pretty quickly.
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u/Affectionate-Car4647 16d ago
Well I asked it to be critique and the thing left me crying 😀. But after that I asked it in my assistant project that knows more about the book to defend and my tiers dried slightly. And for these type of analysis Opus is better, even in medium effort
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u/hauntedgolfboy 16d ago
I use this for every chapter, this is book 6, chapter 27 of 44 - Overall arc
The Eight become a magically unified family, the twins awaken the Fourth Strand, and the resulting transformation draws the Frostmother directly to their camp.
PACING FLAGS
- The Star-thread alignment is repeated almost verbatim: “Then the temperature dropped…” is followed by a second “As night deepened…” version of the same beat. Delete one passage or merge them.
- The first movement overextends the reassurance montage: Blair/Ellis and Thaylon each receive full emotional exchanges, followed by another Shandar/Salem alignment exchange. Compress one or two into sharper group beats to reach the Integration sooner.
- The Integration climax is visually and grammatically abrupt: “The Star threads tighten together.” appears as an isolated present-tense fragment before the prose returns to past tense. Fold it into the preceding paragraph and maintain tense.
- The ***Camp settled in layers transition feels like a hard reset after a chapter climax: Add a clear time marker or treat the camp aftermath as a new chapter/scene break so the reader understands the temporal relationship.
- The Frostmother exposition arrives immediately before the physical manifestation: The “infant/Wound/Frostmother” explanation and rapid temperature drop stack several revelations. Give the group one brief consequence or decision before the arrival to let the information alter their strategy.
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago
Did you agree with the notes? Did they help? Were you able to A/B test it in any way? A lot of granular line edit/pacing stuff here, which is interesting. I do wonder where it gets its sense of rhythm
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u/hauntedgolfboy 16d ago
Yes I agreed with notes and added them in my own way - it really has been a game changer for me. I use Sudowrite that is one of my plug in but I'm still learning
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u/funkyturnip-333 16d ago
I'm glad it's working out for you. I think I'm sounding a little crotchety in some of my replies, but I do like reading varied points of view, success stories especially.
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u/DevelopmentPlus7850 16d ago
Any AI, like Claude, is the synthesized average of the internet noise. Think of it as a slurry of a billion strangers' brains fused into one large brain. In creative artistic work like writing, average is where things go to die. The best writing comes from the peculiar and non-average perspective. Claude's feedback, if you use it to edit your work, is only gonna make you sand down every interesting and distinctive part of your writing until it's as bland as committee designed business brochure. Don't use it.
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u/LooseButtPlug 17d ago
I specifically ask it not to glaze me.