I spent 15 months full-time-ish producing a novel. It would have been 4-5 years had I not used Claude to mimic the voice of the chapters I wrote by hand. This allowed me to focus on the architecture of the story instead of its masonry. It was also kinda annoying when I realized (in a weird postcolonial sense) how I was spending more time sounding right in a foreign language than actually telling the story. So using LLMs felt like a kind of liberation. My conclusion from that experience is similar to yours: LLMs are convention machines. This kinda works for language: unless you are doing literary fiction or poetry, conventional language is good enough, and probably better than what I would have written. If you let the LLM tell the story, it will also be conventional. This probably works for “genre fiction.” But I had a very specific story in mind. I remember asking Claude to outline it, but it simply was incapable of writing what the story was supposed to be. When I started using Claude for the novel in 2024, I could not have predicted how it would get me in trouble with the local book communities and industry explorations.ph/p/ai-sh… Even if I had known, I’d probably still use it. 4 years of my life is like 10% of my probable remaining lifespan.