I’ve been working with Claude to help structure my Hemo Sapiens novel. Essentially, I am asking for advice about logically grouping and naming chapters. This was my first mistake.

Firstly, I asked the AI to ignore my chapters and headings and to tell me what it suggested. It took about ninety per cent from me and offered me different chapter titles about half the time. In one case, it offered my two titles for the same chapter. Secondly, it re9organised some of my chapters—and no, it would not work sequenced as suggested. File this under ‘Order Matters’.

I made most of the changes and asked it to review it again and make more suggestions, if appropriate. I also noted that the chapters it suggested were of wildly different lengths—some as short as a paragraph—, so I asked for consolidation tips.

Claude agreed with my assessment, so it recommended combining two short chapters, say, 1 and 9, together—and why not 7 and 13 while you’re at it. Let’s just say that Claude has no common sense.

I do like a lot of the advice Claude and ChatGPT gives, but you really have to be careful. I swear these guys have a severe psychotropic drugs problem when they’re offline, and it’s affecting their performance.