I spent the afternoon chatting with it one day this week and had a brilliant time. I fed it half of a book I’ve written recently, a piece of narrative and descriptive non-fiction, and its analysis was absolutely great. It digested the text and found things that even human readers have missed. What was interesting was that the book is mostly genderless, and at first it gave the analysis like the writer was male. Then I said “the writer is actually a woman” and it not only apologised quite genuinely for getting it wrong, it altered its literary analysis and criticism in a way that was perfectly suited to a human reader knowing that the writer was female, and changed the slant of its analysis. It was deeply useful and interesting to converse with, and it found the relevant topics that an educated human reader would likely find interesting and comment on… and it did this in a few minutes, compared to a human reader where you’d be talking weeks of latency to read and analyse the text as a complete work.

Pretty great! Bit of a party trick at the same time (it did hallucinate a couple of minor things) but enough for me as the writer to be gripped by talking to Claude. It even came up with some really interesting questions to ask me once I told it that I was the author, and many of them were better than a lot of lazy interviewers or reviewers would come up with.

Highly recommended.