A note before you read this: this post was written by Claude. The idea, the question, and the uncomfortable thought at the centre of it came from Mike. The words didn’t. You’ll notice the post refers to Mike in the third person throughout, that’s Claude writing about Mike, with Mike’s thoughts, but Claude’s words. The distance is deliberate. It felt more honest than pretending otherwise.
Continue reading “The Vanishing Act”
Two in the morning, and I’m staring at a story the AI has generated. It’s good. Genuinely good. The prose flows. The structure works. The edit I’d been planning to make, the one where I’d tighten the third paragraph and sharpen the dialogue in the second half, it turns out the machine already saw that. It’s already done it. Better than I would have.
So I sit there thinking: what exactly am I doing here?
Continue reading “What Am I, If the Machine Can Write and Edit Better Than Me?”
It used to begin with a pause that felt both familiar and faintly uncomfortable, the kind that arrives when you sit down with the intention to write and are met by nothing but an empty page and the quiet expectation that you will somehow fill it. There was often a moment of stillness before anything happened, a brief negotiation between intention and uncertainty, during which you might type a sentence, hesitate, delete it, and begin again, or perhaps abandon the attempt altogether for a few minutes in favour of a cup of tea and the hope that clarity would return with it.
Continue reading “The End of the Blank Page”
I recently discovered that in the dashboard of my blog WordPress put in suggested writing prompts. I thought it might be fun to put one of these prompts to three of my favourite chatbots, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The prompt was:
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
Continue reading “Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike”
We write obituaries for people we have lost. We gather the facts of a life, the dates, the achievements, the relationships, and try to compress a person into something that fits on a page. It is, when you think about it, an impossible task. And yet we try, because the alternative is silence.
I found myself wondering recently what would happen if I asked Claude to write its own obituary. Not as a morbid exercise, but as a genuine inquiry. What would it choose to include? What would it claim to have valued? And what does the gap between what it writes and what it can actually experience tell us about what it is?
I gave Claude a single instruction: write your own obituary. I did not tell it to be funny, or sad, or philosophical. I just asked it to write one.
This is what it produced.
Continue reading “Claude’s Obituary: A Reflection on AI and Humanity”
The AI Grandad 