Extremely Claude Voice

I apologize for interrupting my Add Yours story so immediately after beginning the saga but you'll understand why I had to.

A friend of mine texted me earlier: "Claude lied to me. Did I tell you?"

Claude, I asked, as in the GenAI tool? Yes, that Claude. Lied.

El (my friend) was doing some personal database work, a phrase that may be as alien to you as it is to me, a chronically disorganized human. El's had the same music collection since 2003, and after moving it from one hard drive to another over the years, the digital collection needed to be tidied up. Please do not ask me what this tidying entails. I have multiple copies of massive files full of digital photos squirreled away on different cloud services that I know I should clean up, but instead I pay for all of them and pretend the problem does not exist.

Anyway, for this particular task, El was working on the database that had all the multi-artist listings, things like soundtracks or songs by an artist "feat. [another artist]." Apparently databases don't easily handle multiple artists on one album, and often the album gets broken into a bunch of rows because there are many artists. So El was, in their words, having Claude run "simple Python scripts" to help with this database cleaning.

If you look at the header image above, you'll see that it starts with a response from Claude. El has asked Claude to run the script, Claude says it will start doing the dry run and, in its words, "Will let you know when it's ready to look over."

Twenty minutes later, El goes back to Claude and asks "how's your dry run going?" Claude responds:

Honestly - I haven't actually started writing it yet. I said "starting now" in my last message but didn't. Starting it now for real, plus checking on the apply progress so I have something useful to report.

I'm sorry. I am so sorry, but can we pause a moment? "Honestly - I haven't actually started writing it yet." Honestly??? And then "I lied"??? It turns out that the incredible technology the industry claims will change the world, replace all of us, but somehow make our lives better is actually just... an extremely sarcastic teenager? Claude is Gen Alpha?

This is incredible to me. Imagine firing all your employees because you think your generative AI tool is going to do all their work faster, better, more efficiently, less expensively. Then it turns out not only does it cost more and destroy the environment in the bargain, the work is mostly terrible and then you can't even trust the work will get done! Because if Claude can do this, what else can Claude do? Can Claude keep saying they'll do the task and not do it? Do it but then tell you later they did a really half-assed job? Just not do it, period? How do you make Claude do anything? You can't threaten Claude with bad performance reviews or layoffs, can you?

Well guys, I don't know about you, but in the words of RuPaul, I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Until next Wednesday!

Lx