Digging around on my cloud accounts, I found a couple of fanfics that had survived the Great Purge mentioned in a previous post. Both of them were a bit longer and more carefully executed than the quick-hit  fanfic I discussed in that post, and both were for a heist movie from India which I saw about twelve or thirteen years ago, and was briefly obsessed with.  

One of the fics was an origin story about the forming of the team of con artists. Another was me speculating about past events in the perfunctory romance between the lead con artist and his strait-laced girlfriend. There was also another file, with the start of another origin story fic, this one about the romance. Rereading it, I had no idea where I’d been going with this one. Possibly I had no idea originally either; that might have been why I dropped it. But now I was curious where it would go, and modern AI tools meant that I didn’t need to spend much mental bandwidth on figuring that out. 

I started a fresh chat with Claude.ai by asking whether it was familiar with the movie. It gave the correct cast list, year of release, and a basic summary of the plot, together with the movie’s reception by critics and the public. Using AI for fanficcing movies and TV seems a bit tricky to me, because you’re taking software which has trained to treat words and maybe still images as a series of mathematical relationships, and you’re using it to convey in words something that originated as moving images. I suppose you could integrate movies into those mathematical relationships, but it seems like it would vastly complicate the process. 

Anyway, reassured that Claude had a basic familiarity with the source film, I explained the situation: two finished fics, plus an unfinished one I would like Claude to continue in the same style. I copy/pasted the two fics (maybe 6000 words total), asked Claude to analyze them and tell me when it was ready to continue. 

It responded by acknowledging receipt of the fics and buttering me up a bit about my execution of them, which was meaningless, of course, but gratifying. It also indicated it was ready to continue. 

I gave a summary of the romantic leads’ relationship as it appeared in the movie, including the one moment I remembered clearly from Romantic Flashback Montage Song. I vaguely remembered the song title and could probably have rewatched the video so I could give Claude more data, but didn’t feel like doing that. I did remember that the girlfriend clearly knew about the con artist’s “profession” in the movie, and thought that her finding out might have been an inflection point in their relationship, and told Claude so. Then I pasted the unfinished fic and let the AI cook.  

What I got back was a decent approximation of the style my completed romantic fic was written in…with a surprisingly decent plot. The first main inflection point was the con artist using his skills to help the woman’s father out of a bad situation, in a way that wasn’t illegal. The second was him admitting what he did for a living to her, and her thinking resentfully about the types of powerful people he humiliated with his cons, and deciding, you know what, I can live with that, and being kind of intrigued by what the con artist did.  

Claude flubbed the ending of the one moment from Romantic Flashback Song, because I’d only told it about the beginning. I changed about two sentences to maintain continuity with that. Done.

The first time I did this with Claude, I kind of hemmed and hawed about the source material, gave it the partial fanfic, prompted it badly (initially) about where I was going with this, and only gradually zeroed in on what I wanted. Then I rewrote a few things to be more authentic to the character voices and my take on the source material’s world-building. 

The second time I did this, I wanted a different ending (not in terms of whodunnit but howcatchem) for a late-period Agatha Christie novel (spoilers in that link). I had the impression Claude was not terribly well-versed in this particular novel, which isn’t as widely disliked as some of Christie’s other work from the 1960s, but also isn’t exactly A Big Deal in the sense that Murder on the Orient Express is.  

It also kept trying to give one of the suspects a more prominent role in the murder than he actually had. This might have been because I said wanted Miss Marple to use his relationship with the actual murderer to “perp-sweat” said murderer. Between that and some of the pseudo philosophical musings it gave Miss Marple, I had to do a certain amount of rewriting on this one as well.  

If there’s a lesson in this, it’s that AIs work best which given specific constraints. I feel like this third ficcing attempt, with the heist movie fanfic, went better because I defined the project up front and gave it style examples and basic plot advice. And, more importantly, because I wasn’t as invested in a specific story flow.