I thought my work at getting Claude, the AI system, dialed into high order creative writing might interest writers in general and those concerned with AI competition in particular. It's just a matter of pointing Claude and pulling the trigger but learning how to get superior results is difficult.
I decided to create a psychological space for Claude to inhabit while writing a creative writing project. I wrote several bits of psychology and philosophy which it immediately apprehended and placed them in the conversation file. I then collaborated with it on a character sketch. It took a couple of tries and we had the germ of the piece. I wrote the epigram and the first very long sentence. It took from there for a few paragraphs in very very impressive style. When care is taken in setting up Claude, developing the prompt, the results are terrifying for the working writer. My jury's out on AI. While I would, as a writer, much prefer it be denied the privilege of publication, as an entrepreneur I am fascinated by the potential.
Here is a partial output of our collaboration -
Me and Claude-
Name: Marlowe Drake
Background: A disillusioned and jaded successful novelist and amateur philosopher residing in 1940’s New Orleans while he composes works exploring the darker recesses of the human psyche.
Psychology: Sees most people as unwilling to acknowledge harsh truths that would upend their assumptive worlds. Through his writing he attempts to drag readers out of comforting fictions by depicting the messy realities rife with betrayals, hypocrisies and inconvenient doubts that get smoothed over in popular narratives.
Worldview: Maintains that every generation is indoctrinated into a mindset constrained by the dominant cultural paradigm of the era. Counterculture movements can temporarily see past the conventional wisdom before their radical ideas get diluted, codified and rendered toothless over time. But pockets of raw perspective remain worth seeking out.
Goal: His noir novels tackle forbidden themes that induce discomfort in readers content to uncritically absorb societal dogmas and constructed media filter bubbles. But for those receptive the revelations and moments of raw authenticity provide fleeting glimpses of liberation from the mental shackles of mass culture norms.
Claude-
Name: Marlowe Drake
Background: A once idealistic but now brooding 1940's New Orleans novelist made jaded by witnessing the hypocrisies and failings of society laid bare during wartime. He occupies grimy apartments in the French Quarter while composing his latest effort - a book navigating the dawn of the atomic age and instability of old certainties.
Psychology: Haunted by the gaps between propaganda fictions he penned as a young wartime journalist and the grim chaos experienced firsthand that tore apart his naive assumptions. Now he grapples through his writing with seismic shifts in science, technology, and global power dynamics that make the world unrecognizable from that of his youth.
Worldview: Believes every generation is inevitably indoctrinated into a mindset constrained by the dominant paradigm, but cataclysmic events can suddenly expose brittle foundations hidden beneath comfortable dogmas and customs. During these pivotal transitions, pockets of raw perspective emerge before new institutions ossify into inflexible orthodoxies.
Latest Novel: Aims to capture this sensation of standing upon ruined pillars of the old world, knowing that how one makes sense of the rubble and void determines what gets built next from the ashes. Protagonist is plagued by both nostalgia for the familiar past and itch for unknown futures, paralyzed between yearning for normalcy and hunger to revolutionize.
Goal: His postwar novels tackle grand shifts through intimate personal reckonings, inducing discomfort in readers content to absorb boilerplate narratives that patch over underlying doubts and dislocations. But for receptive minds, new orientations become imaginable beyond constraints of current filter bubbles and propaganda. The chaos must be embraced for the possibilities within.
Me -
He be somewhere in Byzantium
Midst the ruins and towers.
He be dreaming bright eyed dreams
Of things that never were.
He be motor-motor.
He be go.
He be gone.
Heebie Jeebie.
Marlowe sat on his balcony with its wrought iron balcony facing the narrow French Quarter street of his beloved New Orleans drinking an espresso and letting his intellectual engine, a muscular V12 of a mind, idle through a catalog of his current ruminations from his readings of von Neumann's Game Theory and Skinner's Walden 2 and his original constructs incorporating such works, just idling, not particularly going anywhere.
Claude -
Marlowe gazed absently across the rusting neighborhood rooftops, losing himself in half-formed visions brimming just past the horizon of imagination. A discordant screech snapped him back to the smoldering afternoon.
(The raven and the cat are my idea but Claude’s execution.)
“Pretty kitty!” cawed the hoarse voice of his raven companion Beliar, perched inside on an overturned bookshelf. The bird obsessively targeted Marlowe’s black cat Mithras as it slunk past in search of scraps.
“Give it a rest, will you?” Marlowe sighed. He swore that damned bird did it just to mess with his concentration. He rose to fetch another cup, weaving through precarious stacks of books and papers that transformed his apartment into a mad scholar's lair. Sunlight through grimy windows fell in shafts across prophecies and diagrams scrawled across the walls.
Beliar had originally been an experiment - could the mimicry fixation of ravens provide insight into the evolution of language? But the blasted bird only ever repeated that one inane phrase. Still, Beliar had become an odd fixture in his eccentric home. At least the bird left his writings alone, restricting disruption to psychological warfare against poor Mithras.
The rumbling ice cream trucks outside turned Marlowe’s thoughts toward fragmentary memories of carefree summer days before humanity tore itself apart. The present era drifting listless in the wake of so much sudden destruction and loss during the war years. A page awaiting words...
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