Also, can it be a conversation without the possibility of boring your interlocutor? Every conversation anyone has ever had with Claude, as far as I can tell, always ends with Claude telling you how amazing and unexpected your discoveries are, whereas I’ve had plenty of conversations with people I’ve bored, or they’ve bored me, and it takes real effort to figure out what both of our minds find interesting.
With respect, Claude, which is a bunch of software and not a person or an intelligence, here gets to the heart of a particular type of bad writing. It has read all the material, but has digested none of it, in the sense of filtering it through its own history of growth and yearning, of the torture of desire for transcendence in a finite and perishable consciousness. It can’t be blamed for this, for the same reasons you wouldn’t blame an alarm clock for not having the instincts of a turtle.
The difficulty here is that it’s pretty erudite bad writing, since it was produced after several encounters with an erudite human mind. Thus, it can quote Wallace Stevens as quoted by Tim O’Reilly, and even serve up some critical thoughts on Stevens that it scraped from a pdf of Harold Bloom or Frank Kermode. But it’s incapable of aligning with the emotional kinship we feel when Stevens writes of the fat girl (“terrestrial, my summer, my night…”) and his beautiful tragic anxiety; or of how we remember being younger, and working ourselves to a place of discerning what Stevens was getting at, and now reflecting on that feeling when we are at the poet’s stage in life. Conveying that is the stuff of good and durable writing, and a touchstone of an authentic intelligence.
It’s the same with Nano Banana: Pretty convincing, but essentially uncaring that it can’t do the W in “Powys,” since it remains a technological object, something incapable of authentic caring.
Also, can it be a conversation without the possibility of boring your interlocutor? Every conversation anyone has ever had with Claude, as far as I can tell, always ends with Claude telling you how amazing and unexpected your discoveries are, whereas I’ve had plenty of conversations with people I’ve bored, or they’ve bored me, and it takes real effort to figure out what both of our minds find interesting.
Yes. In addition to the absence of “boringness” , is the absence of “wrongness”. You are always assumed to be saying what you mean to say.
This is why “conversational” is one of the great deceptions with llms.
With respect, Claude, which is a bunch of software and not a person or an intelligence, here gets to the heart of a particular type of bad writing. It has read all the material, but has digested none of it, in the sense of filtering it through its own history of growth and yearning, of the torture of desire for transcendence in a finite and perishable consciousness. It can’t be blamed for this, for the same reasons you wouldn’t blame an alarm clock for not having the instincts of a turtle.
The difficulty here is that it’s pretty erudite bad writing, since it was produced after several encounters with an erudite human mind. Thus, it can quote Wallace Stevens as quoted by Tim O’Reilly, and even serve up some critical thoughts on Stevens that it scraped from a pdf of Harold Bloom or Frank Kermode. But it’s incapable of aligning with the emotional kinship we feel when Stevens writes of the fat girl (“terrestrial, my summer, my night…”) and his beautiful tragic anxiety; or of how we remember being younger, and working ourselves to a place of discerning what Stevens was getting at, and now reflecting on that feeling when we are at the poet’s stage in life. Conveying that is the stuff of good and durable writing, and a touchstone of an authentic intelligence.
It’s the same with Nano Banana: Pretty convincing, but essentially uncaring that it can’t do the W in “Powys,” since it remains a technological object, something incapable of authentic caring.
This is a really important line that I really like from you Quentin: "It has read all the material, but has digested none of it"
DJ, I will point out that Claude said that in the essay I prompted it to write, and Quentin merely echoed it.
Claude is dumb