Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of ProWritingAid for spelling and grammar checking. Now it has branched out with a whole AI-powered manuscript critique service, and they offered me a free trial (normal charge £50 or $50).

Manuscript Analysis is broken down into five sections:

• About My Story: Gives you key information about your story’s genre, narrative elements, and competitive landscape.
• Narrative Themes: Highlights the key narrative threads throughout your story, and flags themes that are working well along with themes that could use some adjustments.
• Plot & Structure: Highlights plot points that are working well, as well as those that might need improvement.
• Characters: Examines important characterization moments and highlights areas where a particular character is working well or could use some closer examination.
• Setting: Analyzes how your use of setting contributes to the overall narrative structure of your manuscript. This section flags if you need to improve any aspect of your setting, and what you might do to make it stronger.

So, how good is it? The short answer is “not great.” On the plus side, it showed a reasonable grasp of the story and quite accurately identified three comparable titles (two of which were among those I’d already chosen). The “unique narrative structure” was commended, though I’m hard put to it to understand how an alternation between two narrators might be a unique narrative structure,

Less impressive was the actionable feedback. There were 20 suggestions on plot and structure. Of these, only two were moderately helpful, and some were plain wrong.

Lest this seem to be a fit of pique on my part, I’ll give a couple of examples. The AI was troubled by:

“The timing of Ansna’s second pregnancy and miscarriage is unclear. It seems to occur shortly after the previous miscarriage, which feels rushed and lacks emotional weight.”

There is, in fact, only one miscarriage, something a human reader would have understood. Another chapter is said to have little consequence or outcome:

“The initiation ritual, while descriptive, lacks a clear impact on Ansna’s character development or the broader narrative. The lessons learned seem to have little consequence. Show how the ritual’s lessons influence Ansna’s later decisions or interactions.”

In fact, the character recalls such lessons in five subsequent chapters.

On Character, the AI notes three areas of concern, none of which I accepted. For example, a conflict between two characters is said to be “undeveloped”. This is because it’s a conversation, not a conflict. One of the three is illuminating:

“Ansna and Kautia’s relationship is inconsistently portrayed. Ansna expresses deep love for Kautia, but their interactions often lack warmth or genuine connection, and Kautia’s feelings remain ambiguous.”

I spent some time considering this comment before rejecting it. Ansna is conflicted in her feelings for Kautia. Again, I decided a human reader would not have read this as an inconsistent portrayal. Indeed, no human reader has made such a comment.

It’s worth noting that Kindlepreneur ran Alice in Wonderland through the Manuscript Analysis tool. Some of the issues were similar. Alice is said to lack emotional depth:

“Despite the bizarre events, Alice rarely expresses strong emotions. Her reactions are often muted, which makes it hard for the reader to engage with her experience.”

The driving force behind this criticism is, perhaps, the emphasis in modern Western novels on emotional exploration. But Alice is a Victorian upper-class girl, stiff-upper-lipped and confident of the social rules, even as they are buffeted by the absurdity of the Wonderland creatures. She behaves entirely consistently with her background and class. Emoting would be entirely wrong. This failure to grasp the nuances of the setting underlies another critical comment:

“The symbolic meaning of Alice’s experiences is not fully developed. The lack of thematic depth makes the story feel somewhat superficial.”

I would beg to differ. First, this is a book for children, so too much symbolic depth would be inappropriate. Second, and more important, the fundamental symbolism is abundantly clear in the repeated challenges to Alice’s sense of order by the other characters.

This leads me to my conclusion about the app. If the tool makes interpretations that no human would, this is no surprise. The AI does not “understand” a story. It merely follows algorithms that look for patterns of word associations its database says are probable. The net result, in the present stage of development of the technology, is to default to tropes. Though it is an impressive leap to be able to (more or less) follow a narrative arc over tens of thousands of words, my judgement is that the release of this tool is premature.  More work will be needed to give the tool a better grasp of context and psychology.