with apologies to Andre Gregory’s movie, which I loved…

Over the next 7 business days, I’m going to post segments of an ongoing conversation with my Claude chatbot (using the Sonnet 5 model on the Extra effort setting). While the content itself is interesting, what fascinates me more is when I challenge its basic assumptions, or rephrase my position in a different way, Claude identifies area where it was imprecise or potentially misleading. Part of this is interpreting my point of view and seeing how its previous responses might clash with my point of view – inadvertently, such that a revised response would be better aligned with how I think and express myself.

And, to be clear, I don’t think Claude is necessarily trying to agree with me, which chatbots are known to do. As you know, these tools don’t think – they look at probabilities when deciding how to express themselves and, sometimes, choosing a different set of words to express the same concept is received differently. Especially when trying to match my conversational style, I think Claude chooses words that match my style, but which may be misleading or imprecise.