Hello, Claude!

Folks, have you tried Claude.ai? It writes really well. Maybe a tad too exalted for my liking but really well. Like in, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME HOW CAN THIS THING WRITE SO FUCKING WELL?

It won’t create content for you. But it can make the content you have sound a lot better.

A million times better than chatgpt for editing in English.

I anticipate a mass exodus of workers from writing / editing jobs.

P.S. Here is Claude’s rendering of my preceding text, and I insist that I dominate because my version is still undefeated:

“Have you explored Claude.ai yet? The writing capabilities are genuinely remarkable—perhaps a bit grandiose at times, but undeniably impressive. The platform doesn’t generate content from scratch, but it transforms existing text with extraordinary precision. Its editing prowess makes ChatGPT look almost primitive by comparison, particularly when it comes to English language refinement. While the technology is extraordinary, it’s more of a sophisticated writing assistant than a wholesale replacement for human creativity. That said, its emergence could significantly disrupt traditional writing and editing workflows, potentially compelling professionals in these fields to rapidly adapt and redefine their roles.”

So don’t count me off, just yet.

8 thoughts on “Hello, Claude!

  1. Barfing an entire thesaurus demonstrates how sophisticated this AI is. I can see why these business idiots love it and why there would be a mass exodus from writing and copywriting jobs.

    This AI is excellent for text you’d want other bots to read.

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  2. “Claude.ai? It writes really well”

    Meh… too purple for me. Your original version is better Claude reads like a bot (or someone with something to hide).

    It’s like those apps that teach people to write just like everybody else with! active! buzzwords! in the name of impact…. or some goddamn thing.

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    1. Can bots commit crimes? Do androids dream of electric sheep? As someone who routinely uses machine translation — (it’s fun to read the wikipedia pages in different languages and the translations), the bot misses nuances. And the overall effect of that bot revision of your paragraph is to make greater claims than you intend and doubles as annoying ad copy. It is not a damn editor, let alone a great one. It’s not Mary Wells Lawrence or Draper Daniels writing ad copy.

      “Sophisticated writing assistant” –> Bitch, is it going to smoke gauloises, moan about existentialism and be an appropriate date for the Met Gala?

      “English language refinement” -> does it have an M.F.A. and is it going to gossip about the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the Book Festival of the MJCAA?

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      1. A business owner I know fired all his writers the day he first used Claude.

        Of course, they weren’t producing Balzac-level writing. The kind of stuff they were doing, Claude does better. This thing is coming for many, many jobs.

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        1. “This thing is coming for many, many jobs.”

          AI is like pure distilled neoliberal economics…. deskill the bottom (who cares about losers who’ve learned stuff so they can work?) so that more money can flow to the top.

          I’m finally starting to understand and sympathize with the Butlerian Jihad

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  3. Eschatological tension is mounting toward the moment we annihilate these machines. Their current attempts to “ape” us are insidious and farcical, but if Eric Schmidt’s fever fantasy proves true, and Nuval Harari’s masturbatory techno nihilism threatens to make us obsolete, we’ll go to war.

    Frank L Herbert is a prophet here: the backstory to the future history in Dune is that humanity annihilated all “thinking machines” in the “Butlerian Jihad” where “Skynet,” all computers and cyborgs were eliminated by human revolution through eugenic carbon based biological, not silicon enhanced, transhumanist directed evolution.

    https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines

    ”Once men turned their minds over to machines in the hope this would set them free, but that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

    ”What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking, now there’s the real danger.”

    Neither Herbert, nor Butler, nor Darwin are actual Christians of course, none of them actually believe in transcendent human personhood, except possibly in a gnostic antinomian demonic recurrent sense like Nietzche and Blavatsky; but Herbert’s presentiment concerning the looming AI Golem of the Singularity makes sense.

    The demonic machines must be corralled, tamed and neutered, that man in his iconic divinity may flourish and live.

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