This morning, Anthropic announced the paid version of Claude, the best alternative to ChatGPT currently on the market. Writers need to sign up.
The free version is still there, at Claude.ai, but the paid version, which costs $20 a month, allows you to ask five times as many questions as the free version, priority access during peak periods, and early access to new features.
I’ve been using Claude since their second version came out because Claude lets you upload an entire book and ask it questions like “what are the biggest plot holes in this story” and “generate a chapter-by-chapter summary of the entire book.”
It’s also been trained on more recent data than ChatGPT and has, in my opinion at least, a more natural style.
I previously had a ChatGPT Pro subscription, which is also $20 a month, but ChatGPT doesn’t allow you to upload entire books. In fact, it has a relatively small context window. The context window is the length of the conversation you can have — or how much text you can paste in at once. ChatGPT tops out at around 4,000 words — and Claude has 75,000.
Another advantage of Claude over ChatGPT is that Claude doesn’t use your text for its training data. ChatGPT has the opt-out option as well, but if you use it, you will lose access to your entire chat history. Shame on you, ChatGPT.
Claude is an amazing resource for brainstorming, worldbuilding, creating story outlines, character sheets, and other assets for your books. Plus, it can do quite a bit of high-level developmental editing, including identifying story problems and offering suggestions. It even knows all the major story templates, including the Save The Cat beat sheet, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, and the Hero’s Journey.
But one of the best uses of Claude is to generate marketing content. In a few seconds, it can write a query, create a one-page synopsis of your book, give you ten log line options, or write description text for your Amazon listing.
Claude is one of the two main AI tools that I recommend for writers today. The other one is Adobe Express, which offers unlimited, free AI image generation — and the AI is only trained on legally licensed data and they pay artists and the images can be used commercially.
MetaStellar editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist, writing stories set in a future virtual world. And, during the day, she is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@metastellar.com. She is also the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, one of the top global sites covering virtual reality.