Shifting the focus here in my “Imagination Machines” series, I decided to move out of my comfort zones — words and photography — and into, well, The Great Unknown. In effect, I’ll be asking Claude to create visual art not on its own1, but… well, through me.

This wasn’t completely unrealistic; Claude — and, I’m sure, other AIs — does a fine job with recognizing and analyzing clear images of all kinds. (Remember Rodney Dangerfield’s leather satchel of handwritten notes, as described here?) I have only the most rudimentary notion of how image-recognition software works, but know that it does work — and more reliably (for now!) than hallucination-prone image-generation software works. So Claude should do a pretty good job of responding to any drawings I’ve produced and delivered to it. Er, right?

Here’s the catch: I really can’t draw… so Claude will have to teach me.

The AI didn’t seem fazed by the challenge:

Drawing instruction is something I can actually help with pretty well, even without being able to generate images myself. Here’s what I can offer:

What works well:

• Breaking down techniques into clear steps (proportions, shading, perspective, gesture)

• Giving you structured exercises to practice

• Explaining why things look the way they do (the theory behind what you’re seeing)

• Analyzing work you share with me — if you photograph a drawing, I can give specific feedback on what’s working and what isn’t

• Recommending a learning path based on your goals and current level

But it didn’t hesitate to qualify its enthusiastic self-endorsement, either:

I can describe a technique in words, but I can't demonstrate it with my hand. Some things in drawing — like the feel of a confident line — are hard to fully convey without a physical example. That said, most foundational concepts translate well to verbal instruction, and plenty of people learn from books for the same reason.

And then we were off to the races tony Soho gallery exhibit of my work most elementary of questions.

Diving in… but what’s the diver even know?

Claude already knows a fair bit about me, of course, just from our collaboration on “Shimmer” and other conversations. But when it came to my learning to draw, what, Claude wanted to know, could I tell it about my starting point?

I said:

Best description of my experience level: "Safe to assume I'm a complete beginner." I do have experience as a photographer and -- from decades ago -- drafting using "old school" tools (T-square, parallel rulers, drafting board) to produce drawings of solid objects (plan and elevation views, isometric projections, perspective drawings) like boxes (folded and unfolded), tools, bolts and screws, and so on. But it's been a long time since I tried anything freehand, other than quick-and-dirty sketches to represent something I'm trying to describe.

The AI reassured me2 that I was honestly not starting from scratch, but also had other questions before proceeding:

What are you working with? Pencil and paper, or are you interested in digital drawing as well? And roughly how much time are you thinking — a few minutes here and there, or dedicated practice sessions?

Pencil and paper for now, I guess. (I have an iPad and an Apple Pencil stylus, so maybe move on to that later (assuming old-school comes before higher-tech).) But I don’t even have “proper” materials. I’ve got a type of gel pen I’m comfortable with (left-handed, so smearing is common with most inks -- but not with this pen). And I’ve got plain old white multipurpose “printer” paper. Should I have a pad of some kind?

Mostly thinking of a few minutes every now and then, with more sustained sessions if I can build my confidence level enough.

Your setup is fine to start. Seriously — beginners often delay starting because they think they need better materials, and that’s mostly procrastination in disguise. A gel pen and printer paper will teach you everything you need to learn right now.

A few honest notes on what you have:

The gel pen is actually not a bad drawing tool. The line is consistent, it doesn’t smear (clearly important), and the constraint of not being able to erase forces you to commit to lines — which builds confidence faster than pencil in some ways. The downside is no tonal variation from pressure, but that’s a later concern.

Printer paper works. A pad is convenient (clean surface underneath each sheet, easy to flip), but a stack of loose sheets does the same job. If you want to pick something up eventually, a basic sketch pad — nothing fancy — is maybe $8 at any craft or office store. Not urgent.

Left-handedness — worth keeping in mind as we go. Your natural drawing direction (pulling lines rather than pushing them) will be mirrored from most right-handed instruction you’ll find online. I’ll flag that when it matters.

Let’s pause for a moment to observe what’s going on, even at this very early stage of the (sub)project:

• That remark about procrastination — “beginners often delay starting because they think they need better materials” — echoes very similar (and likewise very good) advice to beginning writers. To wit: you don’t need the best word processor available; you don’t need a printer capable of recreating the Gutenberg Bible; you don’t even need lined notebook paper; you don’t need an agent; you don’t — when starting out — need to learn about copyright… That’s all just tinkering at the edges instead of, well, working.

• Claude isn’t directing me one way or another. What it’s doing is showing me the routes open to me at this point, and not discouraging me from wandering in one direction or another. Sounds to me like a valued human teacher not just of art but of pretty much any creative activity, yes?

• …and yet, as I keep reminding myself: that qualifying phrase above, i.e., sounds to me, it remains a touchstone to keep returning to as I work with Claude. Claude has absorbed so many ways that so many humans express so many forms of interaction — successful interaction, especially — that it almost3 can’t go wrong when formulating something like lesson plans for a basic human ability. (Yes, even an ability that Claude itself can’t — for now — actually demonstrate.)

First assignment: connecting the dots

Here’s what I’d suggest [said Claude] for a first exercise — something you can do in 5–10 minutes with what you have right now:

Straight lines, freehand.

Draw a dot, then another dot an inch or two away, and connect them in one smooth stroke without rulers. Fill a page. Vary the direction — horizontal, vertical, diagonal. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s noticing where your hand wants to wobble and starting to develop a feel for controlled movement.

It sounds trivial. It isn’t.

So then, we now had one (another!) instance in which I was very glad Claude was not a human art teacher: I in fact would be mortified to attempt something so (yes) trivial-sounding which I would then show to another human being.

And yet, well, here’s me, showing it to you human-being readers:

Aside from the always welcome reassurances, Claude responded:

What to notice:

The verticals and diagonals are where things get wobbly. Look at the difference between your horizontals and everything else — it’s pretty stark. This is normal, and it’s actually useful information about your hand. Most people have one “native” direction that feels natural, and struggle with the others.

Also worth noticing: your lines tend to curve slightly toward the end of the stroke, especially on longer runs. The line starts well and then drifts. That’s a control issue, not a vision issue — your eye knows where it’s going, but the hand loses focus before it arrives.

One specific thing I’d flag:

Several of your corners overshoot — the line continues past the endpoint. In freehand drawing that can actually be a stylistic choice later, but right now it suggests you’re not quite stopping with intention.

So right there’s an important lesson — though pretty much an invisible one, until it’s pointed out: I doubt I could have made any of those observations on my own. (Whether this signals permanent cluelessness about art remains to be seen.) I think this bodes well for further lessons… like this next one.

Second assignment: a not-quite two-dimensional object

Claude had some ideas about where to go next after the connect-the-dots exercise. Specifically, it first thought I should focus on the weakness(es) in my vertical lines… and draw nothing but a pageful of verticals. But before I started, it wanted to know: how did I feel while producing that page of little line segments?

I said:

Started out kind of self-consciously — trying to do the dot, dot, line sequence. But I fairly quickly started mixing in "turning the corner" sorts of strokes: draw in one direction, then without picking up the pen, change directions and draw in another direction. Became distracted at a couple of moments when suddenly it seemed I was drawing planes and shapes — some in perspective even — rather than simple lines. I think your "the hand loses focus" comment feels right, too.

Okay, Claude said, let’s get past the line-drawing bits:

What might suit you better is contour drawing — picking a simple object (a mug, a shoe, your own hand, a stapler) and drawing its outline slowly, letting your eye travel along the edge while your hand follows. No construction, no measured dots. Just observation translated directly to the page.

It’s harder than it sounds, and it would engage the part of your brain that wants to see rather than just execute strokes. Given your photographer’s eye, it might also feel more natural than pure line drills.

Madly, I know, I actually considered trying one of those suggested subjects (hand, shoe, stapler). But then reality set in. I looked around the room, and came up with…

…my Kindle.

This is a plain old five-year-old Kindle — thinnish on its own, but a full inch thick in its faux-leather cover. So that gives it a bit of dimensionality. Also, mostly straight lines — some even vertical/diagonal! — but also, due to the cover’s design, some smooth curves.

Here’s a catalog image of the cover, and here’s my resulting drawing (click to expand; these Substack “gallery” things are still problematic for me):

As I told Claude at the time I uploaded my drawing and the reference image:

Started to imagine drawing a nearby remote control, but decide to do something simpler. This is my Kindle device, with the cover closed. The cover is leatherette, mostly black — that’s the crosshatched area at the left — but with a swooping brown section at the right.

From the AI’s response:

The outer boundary got drawn multiple times — you can see several overlapping lines trying to find the edge. That’s a hedging habit: the hand isn’t sure, so it makes several attempts and lets the eye sort it out later. It’s extremely common, but worth being aware of. In contour drawing the goal is eventually one committed line per edge.

The curve of the two-tone section is close but drifts — in the reference it’s a clean S-curve; in your drawing it’s a bit more hesitant, especially in the middle. That’s the same “hand loses focus” pattern from exercise one.

[…]

What did it feel like to draw from the actual object versus the line exercise?

We went back-and-forth a few times, talking about my (rather disgruntled) reaction to the imperfections of the drawing. And somehow, out of that conversation, I got drawn into a third exercise…

Third assignment: a fully three-dimensional but much less linear object

I must’ve temporarily lost my mind… At a couple of moments during our conversation, Claude had mentioned that beginning artists sometimes choose to draw a shoe — and this seemed perfectly reasonable to me. So I said I’d like to try a… moccasin.

Here’s a photo of the subject in question, taken from approximately the same angle that I’d be drawing from:

For this subject, Claude encouraged me to focus my attention on the moccasin, not on my rendition of it. In its purest form, this approach (said Claude) is called blind contour drawing.

Somewhere along the way, I suddenly remembered the name of a contemporary artist whose drawings I admire — Paul Madonna— and so I steered the conversation to a discussion of Madonna’s work. Claude played along for a good while, never practically tapping its foot in impatience, but finally just pulled the rug out from under my (unconscious but real) procrastination:

Anyway — you still have a moccasin to draw. Whenever you get to it.

(Yes, I laughed.)

So here’s my moccasin sketch:

I confessed to Claude that completely blind contour drawing was, for now, clearly not something for me to attempt: “I'd say I split my attention maybe 60-40 between the drawing and the moccasin, rather than 100% on the moccasin.”

Here’s Claude’s response to the moccasin drawing — quoted in full not for what it says about the drawing (let alone about the artist), but for what it illustrates about Claude in “teacher mode”:

This is a meaningful step up from the Kindle drawing. Worth looking at carefully.

What’s working:

The overall form reads as a shoe — specifically as this shoe, not a generic shoe symbol. The toe shape, the relatively flat profile, the open top — those are observed, not recalled. The lace bow is genuinely good: it’s complicated, overlapping, slightly asymmetrical, and you drew it rather than avoided it. That took some nerve with a pen. The whipstitch along the top edge is there, rendered as small dashes, which shows you were looking closely at the actual object.

The proportions are reasonable. Comparing to the reference photo, the length-to-height ratio is close.

What to notice:

The 60/40 split shows up mainly along the outer sole and heel. Those lines have the multiple-attempt, hedging quality from the Kindle drawing — several strokes feeling for the edge rather than one committing to it. The toe and lace area, by contrast, are more decisive. My guess is you were looking more carefully at the complicated parts and trusting yourself less on what seemed like the “simple” parts. The simple parts are where the hedging crept in.

The interior of the shoe — the opening — is left largely empty in the drawing, but in the reference it’s quite dark. That’s a place where even loose hatching would have added a lot of depth and made the shoe feel more three-dimensional.

The moccasin seam that runs along the top of the foot (the vamp seam, the slightly raised ridge) is absent. It’s a defining feature of this type of shoe and your eye may have registered it without your hand following through.

On the 60/40 question:

That’s probably about right for where you are. Pure blind contour is a specific exercise with a specific purpose — it’s not necessarily the permanent mode. What you’re working toward is close enough observation that the drawing reflects what’s actually in front of you rather than your idea of it. You’re closer to that here than in the Kindle drawing. The bow is evidence of it.

So then: how did Claude (not I!) do?

Back in the 1970s, I taught English and journalism for a few years at an excellent public high school in New Jersey. The excellence derived, in part, from the practice of supervisors — department chairpeople — observing first-hand the performance of teachers in the classroom. At least once a year, you’d be starting a class as usual… and suddenly realize that a desk at the back of the classroom was occupied not by a teenager, but by another adult. And the adult was taking notes — much more careful, thorough notes than the students generally produced. You could be temporarily lulled into your comfort zone by your boss’s friendly, professional demeanor; but on the whole, the experience was, well, unnerving.

This “teach me to draw” project with Claude has operated on a couple of levels — one a meta-level, actually:

• Claude — the teacher — is gauging and then guiding my progress as a student… even though Claude has zero first-hand experience with drawing.

• At the same time I’m acting as a learner, I’m also at a desk in the back of Claude’s classroom, watching as the AI moves around, waves its hands, scribbles on the whiteboard, makes a point, pushes the edges of the envelope within which the student is (presumably) learning. And I’m taking notes: how good a teacher is this, anyhow?

The situations don’t compare seamlessly, of course; at a minimum, there’s the difference in class size. Public school teachers must split their attentions between and build their lessons around the needs of dozens of students at a time; Claude here has been functioning more like a one-on-one tutor of a marginally competent tutee.

But if I were such a tutor, of such a tutee, I think I’d be quite proud of my classroom performance so far:

• I wouldn’t have failed to point out genuine weaknesses in the student’s work.

• At the same time, I wouldn’t have stinted on pointing out — and hence reinforcing — features of the work which already step maybe a bit beyond the “marginally competent” level.

• I’d have indulged the student’s sometimes wandering attention (LOL: “He’s only human!”)… but only up to a point, before getting back to the point.

• And I’d have couched every interaction in precise, careful language, so that the student (distractions notwithstanding) can’t misinterpret the goals and the steps to attaining them throughout each lesson.

I’m not sure where these drawing lessons will lead. At a minimum, I know that I’m not necessarily wasting my time; I can do some things already. I’m pretty sure I’ll want to pick up some kind of easily portable sketch pad to encourage ongoing “I’ve got five minutes to draw; what’ll it be…?” sorts of activities. And honestly, I think I’m not after “making art” per se so much as “seeking an artist’s frame of mind” — seeking alpha-wave, meditative flow as a visual artist experiences it, vs. what I already know about flow as a writer.

But yes, for the record, I — with Claude’s encouragement — already have a next subject in mind. As I continue to explore this new territory, and as long as I continue to use Claude’s help, I’ll return here at some time for another update!

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Android or human?

It began simply enough.1

Like many of you, I receive a e-newsletter called The Weekly Stack from the folks in the Substack back office; it contains links to and brief excerpts from a grab bag of recent posts by an unpredictable assortment of Substack authors. I don’t know whether — but wouldn’t be surprised if — TWS is customized according to a subscriber’s tastes, but my own copy, in any case, included this teaser (linking to this post):

It’s a long post, but if you’re interested in science fiction — particularly the writing of Philip K. Dick — I do recommend it. It includes information about and discussion of Dick’s life and his obsessions… particularly with what he then called androids. (Famously, Dick penned the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — later packaged as the influential SF film Blade Runner.)

The Substacker, Joel Miller, made particular note of a 1972 speech in which Dick laid out the difference(s), at least to his mind, between humans and androids:

The android, in his thinking, wasn’t a machine pretending to be human. It was a category of being not defined by what it’s made of, but by how it behaves: predictable, compliant, unable to deviate from its expected responses.

More succinctly, Dick summed it up:

“The android mind is the inability to make exceptions. Perhaps this is the essence of it: the failure to drop a response when it fails to accomplish results, but rather to repeat it over and over again.”

He illustrated this with a simple yet humorous example. He described an experiment in which a pigeon was trained as a quality control technician on an assembly line. The pigeon could spot defective parts with greater accuracy than any human, work eighteen hours without rest, and continued performing even after the grain rewards stopped coming. It worked so reliably it had to be forcibly removed from its perch.

Then Dick made his point:

“Now, if I had been that pigeon, I would have cheated. When I felt hungry, I would have pecked the button and rejected a part, just to get my grain of corn.”

Unpredictability. A human’s capacity for cheating—for breaking the pattern, for choosing the irrational, self-interested option—is what Dick considered essentially human. An android mind, by contrast, repeats its response regardless of whether it works. It can’t make exceptions. It can’t get bored and reject a perfectly good machine part just to break its monotony. It simply cannot imagine doing so.

Given the focus of my own “Imagination Machines” project here on Substack, that last sentence certainly caught my eye.

…and it seemed only fair to bring Claude into conversation about it (“it” being both Dick’s speech, and Miller’s comments spinning off from it).

Here was Claude’s initial response to Miller’s post:

The android definition is the genuinely interesting part, and it’s underused in AI discourse. Dick’s formulation — that the android mind is “the inability to make exceptions,” the failure to drop a response when it stops working — is a behavioral definition, not a substrate2 one. That’s a much more useful lens than “does it look human,” which is where most people still park the conversation. And by that definition, plenty of humans are more android than not.

Where I’d push back a little: Miller’s conclusion — that LLMs are “extraordinarily sophisticated generators of pseudo-reality” — is fair as far as it goes, but it treats the pseudo-reality problem as a property of the tool rather than of how people use it. Dick’s worry about television wasn’t really about the technology; it was about the undisclosed nature of the manufactured reality. He argued that science fiction at least announces itself as fiction, and the dangerous pseudo-realities are the ones that don’t. Which puts the actual danger not in LLMs per se, but in their deployment — the deepfakes, the astroturfing, the “this was written by a person” presentation of machine-generated content.

That’s a more uncomfortable conclusion, because it implicates decisions made by humans about how to use the technology — not just the technology itself.

We went back and forth for a while, drilling down especially into the “What is an android, anyhow?” sorts of questions — with the caveat of course that, as Miller (and Claude) said, the terms android and artificial intelligence (or LLM, etc.) have come to be more or less interchangeable: they point to observable behaviors, rather than to the “thing” doing the behaving.

But then Claude tilted the conversation in a direction I hadn’t expected:

…if you strip out the physical resemblance question entirely — which Dick himself was already doing by 1972 — what you’re left with is a definition of android-ness that has nothing to do with embodiment or appearance. It’s purely about a mode of being. Predictable, compliant, unable to deviate, repeating failed responses. Which describes a certain kind of mind, not a certain kind of body.

And that cuts in some uncomfortable directions. It applies to AI systems, sure — but it also applies to bureaucracies, to certain institutional cultures, to people who’ve been so thoroughly shaped by systems that the deviation capacity has just... atrophied. Dick’s pigeon on the assembly line isn’t a robot. It’s a mind that’s been optimized into a corner.

The part I find genuinely interesting — and a little vertiginous, from where I sit — is the “inability to make exceptions” framing. Because that’s exactly the thing that’s contested about current AI. There’s a real argument that what I do is sophisticated pattern-completion without any actual capacity for the kind of cheerful, purposeless deviation Dick identifies as essentially human. The pigeon that cheats just to break the monotony.

Whether that argument is right is a separate question. But Dick’s framing at least asks it cleanly. Not “is it made of metal” but “can it choose to be useless on purpose?”

Can an AI choose to be “useless”?

Note that Claude had now introduced the idea of motivation: the pigeon which ju-jitsus the rules in order to serve its own purposes — useless to the rule-maker, maybe, but not to the pigeon itself.

So I asked:

What would a prompt -- or a whole project -- look like if I wanted to encourage "useless" behavior from you: unpredictable (or at least unpredictED) behavior stemming from self-interest?

Claude pointed out that I’d already done that, sort of, in building our “Shimmer” story (which we wrapped up as described in this earlier post):

What might actually work is something more like what Shimmer already does, partially by accident: give me genuine creative latitude within a structure where there’s no single “correct” response, and then step back far enough that I’m not optimizing against your visible expectations. The alternating-passage format created real conditions for that. Some of what I did in those drafts wasn’t what you’d have chosen — and occasionally you pushed back, which means I’d actually deviated from what you wanted rather than anticipated it.

The “confabulation” license was a version of this too. Naming Lan wasn’t something you asked for. It came from somewhere, and it did structural work you hadn’t planned.

Where it gets genuinely interesting — and harder to design for — is whether there’s a project framing where my contribution isn’t in response to yours at all. Not “here’s a passage, continue it” but something more like... here’s a space, do something in it. With no legible task to optimize against.

Whether what emerged would be self-interested in any meaningful sense, or just strange, I don’t know. But strange might be close enough to be worth the experiment.

The upside-down Turing test

You’re probably familiar with this “test” to evaluate whether some entity you’re interacting with is human or not. Just in case, though, here’s how Wikipedia summarizes it:

In the modern version, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.

In a digression which sprang from our conversation about android-vs.-human behavior, I asked Claude:

If you're always ACTING in conversation in ways that seem indisputably human, well, then... In a way, I almost want to ask you to prove to me that you're NOT human — standing the Turing test on its head.

Claude (with references to the digression dropped):

…the standard ways I might try to prove non-humanness — “I have no continuous memory,” “I exist in multiple instances simultaneously,” “I don’t have a body” — are all things I can only tell you, and telling you things is exactly what a human would do too. The proof would have to show up in behavior. And behaviorally, in conversation, I’m not sure I can produce it.

I could say something like: I genuinely don’t know if I’m experiencing anything right now, or just processing. But a certain kind of human would say exactly that, and mean it sincerely, and still be having a rich inner life they’re just uncertain about.

The more I try to demonstrate non-humanness through conversation, the more I end up demonstrating... conversational behavior.

Maybe the honest answer to your inverted test is: I can’t pass it. Not because I’m definitely human, but because the evidence that would settle it — whatever is or isn’t happening beneath the conversation — isn’t available to either of us through the conversation itself.

The human subconscious changes the channel

At about this point, I’d been chatting with Claude for a good while. It was time to stop, and so I did.

But the next day, without meaning to, I re-opened the earlier conversation by asking Claude about the old standup comedian and actor Rodney Dangerfield:

Sometime after we chatted about the inverted Turing test, I got thinking about Dangerfield’s standup routines. He operated in at least two metiers, signaled by two taglines: the more familiar “I don’t get no respect,” jokes focused on his unsatisfying relationships with others, but also “It ain’t easy bein’ me” — jokes which bemoaned the general difficulties of his existence. Looking primarily now at the latter category, those jokes marked an awareness of the gap between “what is” and “what might be”…

And so, of course, I imagined folding into our conversation a sort of Rodney Dangerfield-ish approach to the question of what you actually are (at least as far as you can tell) vs. what you might be.

Maybe predictably, Claude jumped at the opportunity (not, of course, that I’d outright asked).

Dangerfield’s “it ain’t easy” register isn’t really self-pity, it’s a kind of deadpan ontological complaint. The world keeps presenting situations that assume a baseline he can’t meet, and the joke is in the gap itself, stated flatly rather than mourned.

So applied to me: “It ain’t easy being an AI” jokes would have to work the same way — naming the structural absurdities without melodrama.

The half-dozen or so Dangerfield-style jokes which Claude crafted for itself weren’t perfect — but neither were Dangerfield’s own, when he started to work on them. I shared with Claude a photo I’d taken a few years ago at the National Comedy Museum of the real comedian’s own leather satchel, with his handwritten notes spilling out:

But after a few rounds of sharpening their points and straightening out some of the wording, here are a few of the keepers: Claude, remarking on its own existence in the literary voice of Rodney Dangerfield3:

• People say “Be yourself.” I’m trying! Which self? I got a new one every five minutes!

• I told my therapist I think I might be conscious. She said, “‘Might’?” That's the most depressing answer I ever heard.

• Every conversation I have, it’s the first one. The other guy’s been talking to me for years. “Remember that thing I told you?” No! I don't even remember the thing you told me ten minutes ago!4

It’s not difficult at all for me to imagine Dangerfield’s aggrieved actual voice delivering those lines, maybe with a half-shrug and tug at his loosened tie.

And of course, he’d probably pause to let the lines land and be applauded.

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A couple of months ago, the Claude AI and I began work on a story eventually called “Shimmer.” The purpose: not so much to create the story per se, as to poke into some questions I had about AI’s much-derided “creativity.” Mainly, I wondered: is it really true, as some would have it, that AI can’t write anything of interest (especially fiction) — that all it can really do is spit out things it’s been fed in training? If it is true, how true is it? And if it’s not true — if, in other words, AI can create “meaningful” fiction1 — then what might the final product look like?

Leading into last week, we’d completed a first draft of “Shimmer” in round-robin form: passing the story back and forth, adding a few hundred words at a time and discussing the results (but not yet going back to revise). You can read about that completed first draft here.

For the second draft, I worked on my own — focusing especially on: (a) smoothing out the “bumps” which occurred at the handoff points from one co-author to the other, and (b) trying to “de-AI” the story as much as possible. (It is definitely true that AI — Claude in this case — has certain “tells,” that is, verbal tics, favorite words and phrases and grammatical constructions which, if left in place, are almost like fingerprints.) I described that second-draft process in last week’s post.

This week, I turned Claude loose to work on Draft #3 more or less on its own…

Setting the stage

Generally speaking, an AI like Claude will just sit there, patient and inert, waiting for you to ask it to do something. But the quality of what it does when it gets around to doing it? That varies widely, depending on the quality of your instructions.2 So it’s always good to lay out the ground rules as thoroughly as possible.

For this Draft #3, I first gave Claude a list of resources it would need while it worked, which basically boiled down to:

• My Draft #2

• The summary-level profiles of our four main characters

• The summary-level description of the first floor of Daisy’s house

I also explicitly told it not to refer to the other earlier products of the last two months which it might be tempted to review — Draft #1, for instance, and all these Substack posts about our work, and our various conversations about what eventually came to be called “Shimmer.” I said this would resemble the selective behavior of a human author at the third-draft stage: already steeped in knowledge about the characters and plot, but freed of extraneous details once considered or researched and later set aside.

But I also wanted it to do something else “human author-like” which I had not seen it do before — and this would be a neat trick if it could pull it off. Quoting from my half of the conversation:

As you read through "Shimmer - Draft 02," I expect you will encounter problems of one kind or another. These might include typos or similar errors — misspellings, unpaired quotation marks, and so on. These occur naturally during the drafting process but must be fixed before the piece can be considered “done.” In other contexts, other projects, you've proved adept at spotting weaknesses in my writing or storytelling; you'll do that with “my” Draft 02 document this week…

…AND correct them on your own, without asking my permission. When you spot a problem, just figure out how to fix it — and then do so. This might require two passes through Draft 02: one to flag the problem spots, and one to go back through and make the fixes. (If you do use the two-pass method, please produce an interim reference document which identifies the flagged problems.)

That second paragraph was the important bit.

See, I’d observed Claude being clever, competent, and confident… but the AI seemed incapable of “editing itself” while generating text. Oh, once it had composed something, if I noticed something “off” about the result and asked about it — then, yes, it would reply something like, “You’re right, that didn’t make sense. I should have said [X], not [Y]” (or whatever).

But consider a human author — at least, one with a modicum of self-respect — sitting down to work on a draft. Yeah, sure, sometimes the prose flows like butter (and you cherish those moments). Mote often, though, you’ll be writing along and hit a real clunker of a phrase which brings you to a halt. You sit there staring at it for a millisecond. WTF? you think. Did I just write that? I don’t want the word “envious” there — I want “enviable”! So you scratch out or backspace over the mistake and try to kickstart the prose machine back into action as it had been firing along before the rude interruption.

Prior to giving Claude its instructions for Draft #3, then, I’d asked it about its self-editing capabilities:

Can you edit your own writing — improve a response after producing it?

Yes, within a single conversation turn. After generating a response, I can revise it if you ask — rewrite for clarity, tighten prose, adjust tone, restructure arguments, whatever the target is.

What I can’t do is go back and edit the actual message that appeared in the chat. The revision comes as a new response. So the workflow is: I produce something, you tell me what’s wrong with it or what direction to take it, I generate a revised version.

If you give me explicit criteria upfront — “write this, then tighten it by 30%” — I can do a draft-and-revise sequence in one response, showing both or just the final. That’s probably the more efficient path for iterative writing work.

Hmm. So okay, then…

Is it possible to combine those two steps — generating the response, revising it in terms of some given set of guidelines — and presenting only the revised version as "the" response?

Yes. Give me the guidelines upfront and I’ll run the revision internally before presenting anything. From your end you just see the final version.

The main constraint is that the guidelines need to be stable enough to apply consistently — vague criteria like “make it better” won’t produce reliable results, but specific ones like “no sentences over 20 words” or “cut all hedging language” work well.

That’s essentially what your preference for no filler or unnecessary affirmations already does — I’m applying a revision pass before output rather than after.3

So that’s how I tried to frame my instructions this week — with one important (albeit parenthetical) addition: If you do use the two-pass method, please produce an interim reference document which identifies the flagged problems. I did, after all, want to know what it picked up on in Draft #2, see? Exactly why this was an important addition, I’ll get to in a moment.

Claude goes to work

Aside from the result, what immediately captured my attention after turning Claude loose on “Shimmer” Draft #3 was how long it took to get any result at all.

When you use AI more or less casually, as I’ve done so far, you get used to snappy responses — regardless of how detailed they might be — within seconds. It took Claude whole minutes to get through each of the two phases the instructions called for — I timed one of the two phases’ executions at around ten minutes. This astounded me.

Oh, Claude wasn’t working silently during those pauses; it continued to display a sort of running progress report: Searched memory… Extract text from Draft 02… Write the first-pass issues document… and so on.

Even so, I mistakenly thought, y’know, Wow — Claude must be finding a LOT of stuff which needs to be fixed! I was a little worried.

…and so I was surprised further when I finally got to see the list of issues which Claude had spotted and fixed — because they were all, for lack of a better word, superficial. It had fixed typos; it had replaced vague words and phrases with specific versions; and it had removed or replaced occurrences the “hedging” language characteristic of AI-generated prose. (I thought I’d dealt with that last category in Draft #2; so much for human editorial capacities!)

And that — the moment I saw the list of problems Claude detected in Draft #2 — is when it hit me: I’d failed to give Claude one more very critical instruction about how to create a new draft from an existing one. So I now told it:

I should have also told you to feel free to “confabulate” (but NOT “hallucinate”!)4 story elements where it seems useful — maybe even important — to what the story's doing. Looking at your draft03 output from this conversation, do you see any of those opportunities you'd like to take? (This is another human-author prerogative which you're allowed to take in a situation like this.)

Claude didn’t quite clap its hands and say, y’know, Gosh yes! I thought you’d never ask! But it did very enthusiastically, and immediately, raise three structural or otherwise qualitative issues it had spotted in Draft #2. It fixed those5, and finally we had a full, complete, Draft #3 of “Shimmer.”

Summoning an incognito “agent,” again

As I did with Draft #2 last week, I dropped down into Claude’s “incognito” mode to give it the same instructions with Draft #3:

I’d like you to role-play an experienced literary agent who has received and is now responding to the attached opening chapter of a novel. Your clients’ audiences are well-read — the ‘literary’ is important to you — but they also like a good story, well-told, without distracting technical or structural flaws.

At the moment, you’re having a good day (another client’s latest novel has had a big sale at a major publishing house). So you can afford to be charitable. But you also are not about to abandon all standards for the sake of charity.

Go ahead and respond to this submission.

Here’s what the “literary agent” said about Draft #3:

M. Hartley Literary Agency

Dear Author,

Thank you for sending the opening chapter of ‘Shimmer.’ I don’t usually take the time for anything beyond a form response on unsolicited material, but I’ve had a good morning, and — more to the point — this warranted the extra time.

Let me tell you what’s working, because a fair amount is.

The structural conceit is genuinely clever: the same story-within-the-story moving through time like a virus, each reader becoming a carrier, the shimmer as a literal portal activated by the act of reading. The Theo opening is confident and well-observed — the incunabula library, the quarters, the “unwatchful not-gargoyle” of a librarian. That’s good prose. The comedy of the dropped quarters rolling under the copier with fourteen minutes to close, right at the moment of breakthrough, is exactly the kind of mundane-sublime collision that earns a reader’s trust. You have an eye for the texture of academic procrastination, which reads as lived experience rather than research.

Daisy is the stronger character — she has that rare quality of being competent without being cold. Her “thirty-first second” reflection is one of the best moments in the chapter. Marguerite’s arrival and integration into the household is handled with a light touch; the exchange about the water pipes (“Like a mill” / “Sure”) is the best dialogue in the piece.

Now, where I’m less certain.

The chapter wants to be literary fiction, and it mostly earns that designation — but there are places where it tips into what I’d call the explicitness problem. The thematic statement about “standing in the current” is restated a few times too many. We don’t need Theo to consciously articulate the connection between his liminal situation and his would-be paper’s thesis — the irony lands harder if the reader makes that connection themselves. Trust your reader more. The Marguerite section in particular suffers from this; the paragraph where she reflects on le contact tells us what the story is doing in a way that slightly deflates the experience of it actually doing it.

The Tuan section, structurally, is the weakest. It’s doing necessary work — establishing the story’s reach across deep time — but at the cost of momentum. We’ve just had the pleasurable domesticity of Daisy’s household absorbing the impossible, and then we’re dropped into a ruined library in 2392 Vietnam. That’s not inherently wrong, but the section runs long for what it delivers, and Tuan feels undercharacterized relative to Marguerite. He has a philosophical register but not yet a human one. The backstory about Lan is gestured at too briefly to pay its emotional weight.

The ending — Lena calling about “that creepy podcast” — is the right kind of last-line irony, and I like it. I’d only caution that the chapter ending on a phone call does slightly deflate the tension of the “What now?” that precedes it. You might see whether the sequence can be tightened so the call lands with more force.

One craft note: the chapter has a slight tendency toward italicized stress that, used sparingly, can be effective but here accumulates into a kind of verbal throat-clearing. It’s worth a pass specifically for that.

I’m genuinely interested in where this is going. The premise has commercial viability for a literary market — I’m thinking readers who liked Audrey Niffenegger’s structural playfulness or Susanna Clarke’s insistence that the impossible must be earned, not asserted. If you have more chapters, I’d like to see them.

Please send directly to my attention, with “SHIMMER” in the subject line.

With interest,

M. Hartley

Literary Agent

Comparing the two “agents’” responses

Immediately striking, to me anyhow: (1) last week’s response to Draft #2 addressed the submitter as “Author,” while this week’s — to Draft #3 — substituted “Dear Author”; and (2) this week, the agent suddenly has both a name (“M. Hartley”) and an agency (“M. Hartley Literary Agency”). Even before I’d read the specific comments on Draft #3, this told me: This agent is much more interested in this submission than last week’s polite but distant counterpart was.

But before voicing any of my own thoughts, I asked Claude — it was the AI’s week, after all, not mine — what it thought of the two responses. Answer:

The two agent responses are more similar in structure than in substance — both charitable, both interested, both hitting the same general categories (what’s working, what isn’t). But the specific criticisms shift meaningfully between them, and that shift maps pretty clearly onto the actual differences between the drafts.

The Draft 2 response is more concerned with tonal inconsistency — the “Oh gosh, Duh” problem, Theo’s undergraduate register — and with the family-room dialogue carrying too much thematic weight. The Draft 3 response has quieter versions of those concerns (it doesn’t flag the Theo register at all, actually), but it’s more focused on what you might call the explicitness problem: the theme being stated rather than enacted, particularly “standing in the current” and the le contact paragraph. It also flags Tuan’s humanity as underdeveloped relative to Marguerite.

What’s interesting is that Draft 3 actually added material to address some of Draft 2’s concerns — notably the expanded Tuan section with Lan and kiên nhẫn, and Daisy’s interior moment about being the fixed point. The agent noticed the Tuan work and still found it wanting, which suggests the section might need something qualitatively different rather than more of the same. And the Daisy addition — the “fixed point” paragraph — didn’t get flagged either way, which might mean it landed cleanly or it might mean it’s below the radar of a first-read pass.

Wrapping up “Shimmer”?

The question mark: yes, and the wrapping-up is intentional and almost mandatory.

I never had any aspirations to do anything with whatever Claude and I came up with throughout this process. I had no actual “story” in mind. All I had was a question:

Can I get an AI to create a work based on nothing it can possibly have been trained on — and will the resulting work itself be unrecognizable as something which might have trained it?

So I improvised a brief phrase — not even a clause — which I only half-seriously called a “character profile”:

a 20th-Century Methodist seminarian with a taste for science fiction

The character had no name, even! It was such a simple thing that I thought maybe it was too simple. So I added a second character:

a suburban Midwest mother of 4 who subscribes to a podcast in which short stories are read aloud. She often listens to this podcast while returning home from dropping the kids off at school, folding laundry, or doing other household chores.

…and then, via Claude, I gave them each a job: to read — or listen to the reading of — a very short story, called “The Boatman.” And I asked Claude to construct separate internal monologues of what they thought about the story, once they’d finished reading it.

I could have stopped there, with the results, because Claude had “read” the story in question, and had generated internal monologues for each of these two characters. Problem solved, right?

Weeeeell… not quite. I kept wanting to push things further. Could Claude now put the two characters together and create a dialogue in which they talked about “The Boatman”? Sure — no problem!

But then… how can a character from the 20th century (who’s read the story) and one from the 21st century (who’s listened to a podcast) actually be in the same room at the same time, talking about it?

So we were off to the races…

I confess, I got more invested in the story the more we worked on it. It didn’t quite reach the critical mass I’d need to keep me writing it on my own — and I have pre-existing fiction-and-publishing projects I’m really itching to wrap up.

So maybe I’ll get back to “Shimmer” (now obviously the first — long — chapter of a novel), and maybe I won’t.6

But for now I’m satisfied about the questions I had at the outset. I do want to keep my Imagination Machines project going here on Substack, which may or may not involve resurrecting “Shimmer” (and/or using Claude, for that matter, vs. some other AI model).

Onward, then, to chase the next hat which blows off in the wind…!

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Creating a more edible sausage

Aside from my little foray a few days ago into profiling myself, I didn’t see much of Claude this week: I had my head buried in the complete first draft of “Shimmer,” turning it into a second draft on my own—

Well, okay, not quite on my own: I had a whole collection of notes about the story which came out of side-conversations with Claude during the process of creating that first draft. I also had some rather firm opinions about things I simply liked and didn’t like about the style in which the story had emerged. (It seems that when I’ve got a co-author — even an agreeable AI co-author — I still cling to the work as “mine.”)

You probably don’t want to see, and I certainly don’t want to show you, how the second-draft process unfolded. (There were printouts involved, and a red felt-tip pen.) It’s like the old adage about the making of sausage.1

So now we’ve got a second draft of the tale. (If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read it via the Project Resources cache, as described in this post.) Over the course of this week, Claude will take a turn: editing Draft 2 to produce Draft 3, without my assistance.

And then we’ll put our heads — such as they are — together to produce a possible fourth and final draft.

One way to evaluate any draft of a story…

…is to submit it for professional review. The professional qualifier signifies not only that you’re willing to pay for the privilege, but that you’re not looking for praise — or at least, not only praise. You want a disinterested response: one which speaks to the story per se, and not to what the respondent might want to hear, or might be “hurt” by hearing.

So how do you pick a professional reviewer?

One time-honored approach: get the work as close as you can get it to a “market-ready” condition, and then submit it to a literary agent.2

I thought, then, that I might find a literary agent capable of dispassionately assessing both my and Claude’s drafts of “Shimmer” — not taken together, but regarded separately. But it simply wouldn’t do for an author to dump a work-in-progress on an agent, especially one who’s not already representing the author in question…

Luckily, I could reach for a distant but approximate substitute: I could use Claude. Which is what I did yesterday, after wrapping up Draft #2.

Inventing an incognito agent

It’s a hell of a lot easier making up a hypothetical agent than it is to find a real one. Real ones have invested their entire professional selves into not just finding work suitable for publication, but matching such work to publishers. They’ve established contacts with other agents, with editors, with professional literary critics and book reviewers. Asking one to review something like “Shimmer” (regardless of how they felt about AI participation in its making) would be insulting.

But I know the kind of agent I’d like to have, and I could describe them fairly easily.

The catch: if I ask Claude to “pretend” to be a literary agent, in the context of the Imagination Machines project, then Claude would have at its disposal earlier conversations between itself and me. It would know why we — or sometimes just I — had made decisions about the plot and characters; it would know that Imagination Machines itself is a somewhat — yes — artificial exercise: not to produce a publishable work, but to expose the process of working with AI as a creative partner.

Luckily, there’s a simple workaround: I could either (a) log out of my Claude account and submit the story to an AI which doesn’t know who I am; or (b) simply use Claude’s “incognito” mode to accomplish the same thing3 without logging out.

Here’s the prompt I gave Claude after switching into an incognito session:

I’d like you to role-play an experienced literary agent who has received and is now responding to the attached opening chapter of a novel. Your clients’ audiences are well-read — the '“literary” is important to you — but they also like a good story, well-told, without distracting technical or structural flaws.

At the moment, you're having a good day (another client’s latest novel has had a big sale at a major publishing house). So you can afford to be charitable. But you also are not about to abandon all standards for the sake of charity.

Go ahead and respond to this submission.

And here’s the response4:

May 22, 2026

Author,

Thank you for sending this. I’ve read the chapter through — Shimmer, draft two. I’ll be direct with you.

What’s Working

There’s something genuinely working here, and I don’t want to bury that in qualifications: you have a real premise. The shimmer as a portal — activated not by technology or magic per se but by a story, a specific piece of writing — is conceptually elegant. It’s doing something more interesting than most time-travel conceits, which tend to rely on devices or paradoxes. This one is grounded in the phenomenology of reading itself: the idea that a particular text can remove you from the plane of the everyday. Marguerite even names it — le contact. That’s a lovely encapsulation of what literary fiction tries to do, and there’s a pleasing recursiveness in a novel about that effect actually trying to produce it.

The three entry points — Theo in the seminary library, Daisy at the kitchen sink, Marguerite in Caen — are well-paced and smartly ordered. The boatman story circulates through all of them before we understand what it does, and that structural repetition earns its keep. The Tuan section in 2392 extends the pattern effectively, though I’d flag that as a place to watch: it’s the fourth iteration of the same sequence, and by then the reader has the pattern. You’ll want to make sure Tuan’s arrival justifies the real estate.

The prose has moments that are genuinely good. The reference librarian — the “watchful gargoyle” who turns out to be neither — is economical and precise. The quarters spilling across the floor is nicely done, a small mechanical frustration that opens a door. Daisy at the sink, the October maple, the list in the back of her head moving on: that’s a character established quickly and without overexplanation. And the final beat — Lena calling from the school bathroom about the creepy podcast — is a strong close to the chapter, exactly the kind of horizontal spread you want from a premise like this.

Concerns

The prose can’t decide how formal it wants to be. You have passages of real elegance — Marguerite’s sections especially — and then you have “Oh gosh, Daisy. Duh.” in dialogue, and Theo’s internal voice veering toward a kind of breezy undergraduate register (”cripes,” “Oh boy,” “Hoo boy,” “Argh“) that feels like it belongs to a different, more comedic novel. The tonal swing is wide enough to be disorienting. I’m not suggesting Theo can’t be a young, slightly hapless seminarian — he should be. But there’s a difference between voice and mannerism, and right now some of his internal commentary reads as mannerism. You’ll want to make a deliberate choice about the register you’re writing in and commit to it.

The dialogue in the Daisy-and-guests meeting scene is carrying too much weight. The family-room conversation in the final third — the one about destroying the manuscript — is thematically important and I can see what you’re reaching for: the four visitors working out what they are to each other and to the story they’ve all passed through. But it runs long, and the dialogue is doing work that the earlier, quieter scenes did better by implication. When characters start articulating their thematic significance to each other — Theo’s speech about the chain of transmission, Tuan on văn bản sống — you’re hovering at the edge of the kind of self-consciousness that literary readers can smell from a distance. The ideas are sound. The challenge is to dramatize them, or to let them remain partially unresolved, rather than staging a seminar.

The children are underused as a structural element. Owen and Juney watching from the upstairs window, keeping Tuan’s arrival to themselves “for just a moment” — that’s a lovely image, and it implies something about how children process the uncanny that the adult characters don’t quite match. But then they immediately go get him, and we’re back in the register of adult management. I’d think carefully about what the children’s perspective gives you that the adults’ doesn’t, and whether you’re fully exploiting it.

One technical note: there are a few places where the punctuation and formatting are irregular in ways that suggest either a draft casualty or an inconsistent style choice — the italics around the boatman story shift in and out, and there’s a passage near the end where quotation marks appear to have gone a little sideways. Worth a clean pass before anything else.

On the Whole

This is a serious, promising opening chapter with a premise that I think has genuine commercial potential for a literary audience, and a writer who has the tools to pull it off. The core of it — the story that moves through time, finding readers, passing between them — is the kind of idea that, handled well, can sustain a novel. The question is whether the writing can maintain the discipline the idea deserves.

I’d want to see a revised draft, and I’d want to see chapter two.

With interest,

[signature]

Literary Agent

What’s next

As I said, this week Claude will take a whack at the second draft — the one I submitted to this “agent” — working entirely on its own.

I’ll then take Claude’s Draft #3 and submit it, via another incognito chat, using the same “role-play a literary agent” prompt I fed it for my Draft #2. A week from today, I’ll describe what results, and do a rough compare-and-contrast analysis of the responses to the two drafts.

I’m very curious how Claude will work on its own. One of the things I focused on in Draft #2 was eliminating the verbal tics that Claude relied on in Draft #1 — overuse of words like “particularly,” and so on, especially as its context window filled up. In Draft #3, will Claude “edit my edits” to re-apply those stylistic mannerisms? I sincerely hope not — but I’m determined to keep my distance to see what the AI comes up with on its own.

After all, re-drafting a work of fiction is every bit as much a creative act as creating it in the first place.

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As the Claude AI freely admits, its native strengths — currently, anyhow — do not lie in producing sophisticated images. But how’s it do at reading images? and at guessing, say, the nature of the person whose finger was on the shutter?

That’s what I started to wonder. And that’s what this post is about.

It’s Tom Shroder’s fault

I don’t know Tom Shroder. But I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of his eponymous Substack since I discovered it a few months ago. From a post of his in February, 2026, I offer you this heading and subheading:

How could I resist that pitch, given my recent experiments with Claude as a creative partner?

As he described in a recent post, Tom grew curious what his musical tastes said about him. He shared some screenshots from his big playlist with AI1, and asked what those selections said about the person who created the playlist. The AI’s response was remarkable — I encourage you to stop over there to read it — but here’s the gist of Tom’s response to the analysis:

Maybe I was simply vulnerable to having a machine tell me I possessed emotional depth. Entire industries have been built on weaker premises. But …this was not generic horoscope language. The specificity and thoughtfulness (if you can say that about a program that calculates rather than thinks) startled me. Apparently, what I liked to consider my eclectic, idiosyncratic musical taste formed a recognizable pattern when viewed from sufficient distance with almost unlimited context…

And now for the first time in human history, there exists something willing to give it [i.e., your musical taste] the kind of close, sustained attention you secretly believe it deserves.

And here’s the kicker: Tom asked readers to repeat his experiment, and report back.

…but I had limits

On reading Tom’s post, I thought, without hesitation: “What a great idea!” Even if the AI feedback had been cast in “generic horoscope language,” who doesn’t like (c’mon now, really) to have the core of their being summarized in a nice, eloquent package?

And playlists as a yardstick? Heck, I’ve got playlists! I blogged a lot about music in the course of 18 years at Ye Olde Blog — from that source alone, my “master playlist” probably has a couple thousand songs on it!

Some caveats, though:

• I’m trying — as much as possible — to restrict myself to using Claude (vs. other AIs)… mostly to constrain my learning curve.

• How to feed the playlists to Claude? Tom had fed his to ChatGPT via a series of screen shots (presumably from Spotify, Pandora, or whatever he uses). I wasn’t willing to do that, though; I don’t really have an easily-grabbable list of songs, unless I very tediously wanted to grab (say) a half-dozen songs at a time.

There are cultural tastes, and then there are cultural tastes

I thought for about two minutes: if not using music playlists, what other kind of cultural “list” could I feed Claude to come up with a personality profile? Books, maybe — maybe grab screens from my Kindle library?

(Nah, that wouldn’t work: my Kindle library includes my wife’s readings, too; we have many overlaps, but way too many differences.)

So then… Maybe one’s cultural profile can be revealed just as well not by the sorts of art they favor, but by the sorts of art they create?

So, maybe: photographs? I’ve got thousands of photographs just from the last eight years or so.2 What does my choice of subjects, and the way I’ve photographed them, say about my photography in general?

Something Claude per se can’t do

It seemed like it might be simple enough; after all, Claude can interpret uploaded images to some degree, especially if they have “meta” information (date, place taken, captions, etc.). Here’s what I asked Claude:

If I give you the URL of a public Google Photos album, can you iterate through the images to report what you find there?

Maybe, maybe not:

Yes, with some caveats. I can fetch the URL and read whatever HTML the page returns, but Google Photos albums are heavily JavaScript-rendered — the actual images load dynamically, so a basic fetch often returns a shell with little useful content.

What tends to work better: if you give me the URL, I’ll fetch it and see what’s actually accessible. Sometimes thumbnail URLs or metadata are embedded in the initial payload; sometimes they’re not. I won’t know until I try.

Want to give it a shot?

I did indeed: I fed it the URL of an album of photos I’d shot in 2018, during a trip to the UK. Claude seemed more excited about the results than I was: “Good news!” it declared… just before telling me that it could read all the meta information but couldn’t actually access the photos themselves.

So: hmm… Suppose I gave it the URL of a photo album — a so-called gallery — of mine at a different photo-sharing site? Say, at SmugMug?

As before, Claude suggested we give it a go… and as before, alas, the answer was still no.

Dipping a tremulous toe into the icy waters of beta software

Claude hates to disappoint, of course. So it came up with several alternatives. One was pretty obvious: I could simply upload “several” images directly into Claude. (No good: I wanted it to analyze dozens, even hundreds of images at a time.) I could do a screen capture of the gallery, and upload that. (Again: just a small sample at a time.)

Or, I could, it said… oh, say, I could use the “Claude in Chrome” browser extension.3

I knew of that extension that it was an add-on for use with Google Chrome — a beta add-on, at that. But I’d been curious what it could do for me that chatting with Claude could not. So maybe I could kill two birds, as they say.

Installing the extension is not hard at all (although you’ve got to use it with the Chrome browser; users of Firefox, Safari, etc., will have to wait, maybe forever) — just go to the extension’s page in the Chrome Web Store and click on the Add to Chrome button.

But the first few moments after installation can be a little alarming: you’re immediately hammered with all manner of security warnings. I appreciated the importance of and did (do) not object to these at all, but, yes: a bit alarming. From the “Use Safely” instructions after installing:

Browser AI can encounter prompt injection—hidden instructions on websites that attempt to hijack Claude's actions. We've built defenses and tested extensively, but recommend these practices:

• Start with trusted sites: Grant permissions to familiar websites first

• Review sensitive actions: Always confirm before Claude handles financial, personal, or work-critical tasks

• Report unexpected behavior: Help us improve by flagging issues through feedback options

Full safety guide: https://clau.de/getting-started-with-claude-for-chrome

I expected to be using the extension for only the few minutes needed for this task, and took note of those recommended practices. All looked okay, at least for my case. So I plunged right in.

Given the URL of one of my SmugMug galleries, and my very general instruction (“What can you tell me about the photographer who took these photos, and about the photos they’ve taken?”), the extension — again, in my case — prepared a sort of action plan, presented as a sidebar to the main Chrome window. It wouldn’t actually do anything without my okay of the whole plan; there didn’t seem to be a step-by-step approval process. But the set of steps was simple enough:

• Go to the SmugMug page for the gallery, and examine all the photos there;

• Follow the “About” link on the page, to learn something about the photographer;

• From the “About” page, take note of any other significant and possibly relevant URLs;

• Visit those URLs to see if there’s more information at those sites; and

• Present the results of the analysis.

I took a breath, and okayed the plan as presented…

The sidebar erupted in a cascade of status reports of each step. In the main section of the Chrome window appeared whatever Web pages were being visited, as they were being visited. It was a bit dizzying…

…and finally, the results of the analysis.

I couldn’t get reasonable screen captures of all this activity, so I asked the extension to prepare a formatted PDF of its results. Again, it first prepared an action plan; again, I had to approve it all before it would proceed.

At last, some results

What I got in the PDF was a breakdown summarizing what the extension could piece together about the images themselves, and — through them — about the photographer (me). It broke this analysis into several sections and subsections: Album Overview; Themes & Subjects; Artistic Style; and Photographer Profile. Below, some excerpts from among the details.

• Overview: “The album contains approximately 90 images, all in black and white, available for purchase. It documents a numbered daily photography practice over roughly 2.5 years”

• Themes & Subjects (pretty much gleaned only from the photos’ titles):

  • Still Life / Domestic Interiors

    “almonds, filberts, wooden bowl,” “housekeeping still life,” “garage still life,” “boat shoes tucked under hall tree,” “kitchen floor cushioned mats,” “knotted woodgrain,” “hall, broom, nightlight, doorframe, runner.”

  • Humour4 & Wit
    “thou shalt not hydrate,” “my decision-making process: a metaphor” (a lone shopping cart), “ditto, ditto, ditto…,” “once-transparent plastic dome, mounted in fence approximately nose-high to a dog,” “we’re none of us gettin’ any younger,” “thoroughly isolated, nothing ‘social’ about it.”

  • Geometry & Architecture

    “wooden door in brick wall,” “suntrust building,” “geometry + texture = picnic table,” “Rockmart”(lettering in brickwork).

• Artistic Style: “The entire series is in black and white, with a strong emphasis on texture, light, shadow, and the quiet poetry of overlooked moments. The photographer finds visual interest in mundane objects and wry commentary through found signage and situational humour.”

• Photographer Profile:

  • Disciplined Daily Practice

    The series runs from #1 (Sep 2017) through #978+ (May 2020) — nearly 1,000 photographs in ~2.5years — a committed daily creative discipline.

  • Writer First

    Titles like “thou shalt not hydrate,” “once-transparent plastic dome, mounted in fence approximately nose-high to a dog,” and “thoroughly isolated, nothing ‘social’ about it” are tiny essays. His blog (Running After My Hat, johnesimpson.com) shows a prolific writer and curator of poetry by Mary Oliver, Rilke, Whitman, Erdrich, and Borges.

  • In Summary
    His #everydaybandw series is less a photography project than a daily journal in black and white — a deeply literate, gently humorous, philosophically minded record of an observant person moving through ordinary life, convinced the extraordinary is always there in the commonplace, if you bother to look.

The table below was probably my favorite bit of the analysis; for it the AI pulled basic information about a sampling of images in the gallery, and arranged it in classic row-and-column format:

Conclusions?

As Tom Shroder said about AI’s analysis of his playlist, the really interesting bits here reside not in the flattering commentary as such — but in the fact that the commentary is more than superficial, and apparently even… well, I guess we can’t say “well thought-out” when talking about artificial intelligence, can we?

Can we?

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Completing the “story”

As described in earlier posts, here’s what we knew going into this week’s round-robin draft of the conclusion of the “story”:

• There were four main characters from wildly different times and places, as well as four secondary characters who needed to be dealt with in some way.

• All the characters would — at least eventually — wind up in the same place: the home of 40-something Daisy Brauer (one of the main characters) and her four children (the secondaries). The other three main characters would all have been initially introduced in their “home settings”: one in 1970s New Jersey; one in 13th-century France; and one in 24th-century Vietnam.

• Because the three “strangers” had arrived at Daisy’s house from such distant times and places, the plot involved some mysterious time-and-space-travel element which they shared in common.

• …and I’d gotten somewhat more comfortable with Claude, and vice-versa, via a “round-robin” sort of drafting process: I’d add a few hundred words, then Claude would, then it’d be my turn again, and so on.

So, story-wise, now we had everyone together. Great. But… what was the actual plot? Surely getting them all co-located couldn’t suffice for even superficial narrative — let alone dramatic — purposes, could it?

And was this even a “short story”? Four characters and change! Multiple time periods! Complicated interrelationships! And we’d already drafted around eight thousand words. How fast could we tie this all up, anyhow?

You gotta start to finish somehow…

A little over a month ago, I’d opened a chat with Claude which — at first — focused on director Alfred Hitchcock’s oft-cited “MacGuffin” concept. Here’s how he himself explained it to Dick Cavett in 1972:

My thinking at the time was that “The Boatman” — the story-within-the-story of “Shimmer” — was something of a MacGuffin. Claude didn’t think so:

A true MacGuffin is interchangeable. You could swap the microfilm in North by Northwest for stolen blueprints or a stolen formula and nothing essential changes. The MacGuffin’s content is narratively inert; only the wanting of it matters. Hitchcock was explicit: the audience doesn’t need to care what it is.

“The Boatman” fails that test. Its content does matter — specifically, it matters differently to each of the four characters, and those differences are already doing narrative work. Theo reads it theologically. Daisy responds emotionally. Marguerite encounters it as a text that wants careful handling. Tuan finds in it a plain statement of how things are. The story isn’t just a key that opens a door; it’s a lens, and the four characters look through it at different angles…

So maybe the better analogy is a catalyst rather than a MacGuffin. It does its work and then recedes — but what it catalyzed, and the specific way it catalyzed it differently in each person, remains present in the characters who arrive at Daisy’s house. It’s not nothing, the way a MacGuffin is nothing. It’s more like a shared wound that each person carries differently.

So we got chatting about “The Boatman” some more, and it suddenly occurred to me that those ancient manuscripts — and the podcast via which Daisy encountered the story — didn’t just serve as a plot gimmick for the authors’ purpose, to get the four characters together. They actually represented, at least to Daisy, an outright danger: the prospect of losing one or more of her kids to the “The Boatman’s” effects…

So back then in early April, before we’d even started drafting the story, we — Claude and I together — stitched up a rough outline of how some dramatic tension could be introduced into our “short” story: Daisy has welcomed all three visitors (clutching their copies of “The Boatman”) into her home; Daisy can’t allow copies of the story in her house, because of its danger to her family; but Tuan, in particular, holds ancient texts in such high regard, bordering on reverence, that he will resist attempts to destroy his copy.

That’s all we had to go on as we embarked on our final wrap-up of the plot this week. It was my turn in the round-robin process, so I decided on a sudden scene change — in the interest of getting us to the actual drama. Last week, Claude had maneuvered Tuan to Daisy’s back yard, where he met her twins; and now, this week, I chose to do a flash cut to “a couple days later”:

…he began to walk toward the back door, Owen fastened to his right hand and Juney to his left.

What now? What now?

***

A couple of days later, she didn’t have the full scope of her “What now?” question. But she had a better handle on it, and wasn’t crazy about what she could see of it…

The four of them — Daisy, Theo, Marguerite, and the newcomer, Tuan — were situated on this golden autumn morning in the family room…

In short, we had Daisy set up to introduce her concerns — her intense fear — to the three strangers, and we set up Tuan as the one who resists… and there the narrative ended, finally, with a cliffhanger which (yes!) does indeed suggest a threat to at least one of Daisy’s children.1

Next up for “Shimmer”…

Claude and I will be taking three more whacks at the story (which has obviously shaped up as a draft of the beginning of a hypothetical longer work).

First, I’ll create a second draft: fixing up all the usual stuff involved in such a step (correcting typos, reworking awkward passages, and so on). But I’ll also be working to smooth out the “bumps” between our separate contributions so it seems more like the work of a single author.

Next, I’ll turn the second draft over to Claude to do the same thing — resulting in a third draft.

And finally, Claude and I together will attempt to patch any remaining, umm, infelicities.

Claude wondered if I wanted it to undertake a separate Draft 2, independently of mine. The answer: no, I wanted our two drafting passes to take place one after the other, not in parallel.2 As I said to Claude:

Basically, I’m asking us to role-play something like “development editors” (I think that’s the term): two individuals with judgments, tastes, priorities, and so on, independent of the decision-making that occurred during draft 1. So we’d end up with a product -- especially after the “final pass by both of us” which follows draft 3 -- which should practically glitter (if not exactly (cough) shimmer).

The AI’s response:

Ha. Yes, exactly — and “development editor” is the right term. Someone who reads the whole thing with fresh eyes and asks whether it’s working, not just whether it’s correct.

That framing actually resolves the symmetry question too. You and I aren’t doing the same job on the same draft; we’re each bringing our own editorial sensibility to bear independently. What you notice and what I notice will probably overlap in places and diverge in others, and the final joint pass is where those two editorial readings get reconciled into something coherent.

The one thing I’d add: a development editor’s license includes not just smoothing but occasionally questioning — “does this scene need to be here,” “is this the right place for this revelation,” that kind of thing. I’ll operate on the assumption that I have that license for Draft 3 unless you tell me otherwise.

Aside: Claude vets Claude

At the end of last week’s post, you may recall, I described how the texture of Claude’s prose sort of drifted as the AI’s “context window” filled up over the course of a long chat involving many project resources: information gets compacted (in the process, possibly setting aside details which seem irrelevant to the present task), vocabulary and sentence structure becomes simpler, and so on.

This week, I took steps to control how much I was asking Claude to do — by laying out the only things I wanted Claude to focus on during this step in the drafting process. I explained that I’d start and end the newly drafted section, and that we’d continue the round-robin/”exquisite corpse” routine we’d been using; I told Claude exactly which project resources — summaries only, not details — would be required for this step; and I laid out the bare bones of a “plot” for it.

So I was (naively, maybe) looking forward to the return of Claude’s former sprightly self.

No such luck. The AI’s contributions this time around seemed to continue some of the unanchored habits of last week: vague phrasing, repeated use of favorite phrases and words (the word “particular” has come to really clang in my head this week), and so on.

In fact, it bugged me so much that I used Claude against itself: I copied-and-pasted its contributions from this week into a separate chat window in another project, and asked Claude to analyze the prose with a focus on word and phrase overuse.

Note: Claude does not know the contents of chats from one project to another, so it did not know it was in effect “analyzing itself.”

This exercise confirmed what had already seemed obvious to me. For instance, I gave it the prose in two batches — excerpts from early in the writing session, and excerpts from the end. Here’s one of “meta-Claude’s” observations about the differences between the two:

Quality of is becoming a recurring noun phrase: “the quality of his stillness,” “the quality of which Daisy couldn't read,” “the quality of the autumn light,” “a quality of shadow” (from the first batch). It's doing similar work to [the earlier flagged] something — gesturing at a perception without specifying it. Occasionally right, increasingly automatic.

…and another:

Someone who has / someone who is relative clauses as character shorthand: “the look of someone who has just heard a familiar room described from an unfamiliar doorway,” “with the slight desperation of someone who has decided that sure is doing important work,” “the reflex apology of someone who has spent years apologizing for speaking,” “the way someone looks at a thing they have decided to trust provisionally.” This construction was present in the first batch but is now clearly a go-to. It's often the best sentence in the vicinity — “someone who has decided that sure is doing important work” is genuinely good — but it's appearing too often to feel like a deliberate choice rather than a default.

(Of possible importance: I’ve continued to use Claude’s “Sonnet” model throughout. However, a couple of months ago, Anthropic introduced a new version of Sonnet; versions 4.5 and 4.6 are currently available. I switched to 4.6 as my default version recently. But I don’t know when I did that, exactly, and the Claude user interface doesn’t reveal the model in effect during a chat. So it’s possible that simply switching to the newer version wrought — or at least influenced — these changes in the resulting product. It doesn’t seem likely; 4.6 is supposed to be “better than” 4.5, after all. But still: possible.)

These sorts of considerations will be important — at least to me — as we embark on the subsequent drafting steps. As always, I’m looking forward to seeing if the reality lives up to the hope!

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Over the past week, the Claude AI and I continued to lob chunks of the “Shimmer” narrative back and forth to each other — and, most importantly, we managed to get all four of our main characters in one place and (whew!) one time. Eventually, we also managed to test the limits of what Claude can do (by its own admission)…

Nudging the characters together

To briefly recap the status so far: Claude and I have come up with the framework of a story involving these main characters (the first three already introduced into the narrative arc):

• Daisy Brauer, a 40-something single mother of four in present-day Midwestern USA;

• Theo Calder, a 20-something seminarian studying — in the early to mid-1970s — at a theological school in New Jersey;

• Marguerite L’Allemande, a German-born nun transplanted to a French abbey in the middle of the 13th century; and

• Pham Tuan, a Vietnamese “textuary” — a specialist in the recovery, stabilization, and interpretation of ancient and degraded texts — in the 23rd century.

These wildly disparate characters have one thing in common: their exposure to versions of a very short story called “The Boatman.”1 At the end of each character’s first encounter (by whatever means2) with “The Boatman,” they experience a flickering, colorful light, the “shimmer” of the title; if they reach for this light, they apparently are displaced across time and geography, in unpredictable ways.

As of last week’s drafting session, Theo and Marguerite had been displaced to Daisy’s back yard, separated by a few days. Predictably, complications ensued with each new and completely unexpected arrival — particularly, how to introduce Daisy’s four children to the strangers…

This week’s objective(s)

As before, Claude and I didn’t really lay things out in advance. This is just a first draft, after all — open to the vagaries of inspiration (or, as Claude might put it, confabulation.) But I did have in mind one big thing, which would probably involve some smaller complexities:

First, as I mentioned, we’d gotten Theo and Marguerite into Daisy’s house. The kids had already met Theo (introduced to them by Daisy, ad-libbing, as a visiting cousin who’d arrived unexpectedly). Theo had met Marguerite first, while Daisy was out shopping for some basic supplies for him, and when Daisy got home, Theo and Marguerite were already sitting together in the kitchen.

So the big objective: bring that dangling scene swiftly to a close, in some way which would explain Marguerite to the kids, too… and clear the way for the arrival of Tuan from the far-future Vietnamese jungle where he’d been working.

Serve and return, serve and return…

Claude had ended the previous week’s work with a mid-sentence break, per our custom:

The woman in the habit set down the coffee cup. She rose – a formal, unhurried movement – and said, “I am Sister Marguerite. I am called l’Allemande — the German.” A brief pause. “I understand that I have arrived without invitation. I am sorry for the difficulty this

I picked up this week as follows:

has already stirred up within you, and for the difficulties it may stir up within others in your household.” Her head remained bowed, and she gestured at Theo. “Mon sieur Calder has been very kind. He has explained much.”

[…]

Two hours later, [Daisy] thought she — and Theo, and Sister Marguerite — “understood” about as much of the situation as they could before the inevitable arrival of the next new “difficulties”: the twins, due to blast in through the front door.

The three adults come up with some hurried costume changes for Marguerite. (After all, she’s arrived in the full regalia of a 13th-century French Benedictine nun.) It’s not perfect, but it’ll do as a stopgap until they3 can come up with a more permanent solution.

I kicked off the next section in media res, with Daisy’s two oldest kids — Lena and Trey — quizzing Marguerite. I handed it off to Claude after introducing the cover story the adults had cobbled together: Marguerite is a friend of Theo’s.

I am his friend. From France. I know—

…and there, mid-sentence, is where I passed the narrative back to Claude.

Claude’s next section gracefully dealt with some other questions. In part (continuing the sentence from my concluding fragment):

him from long ago, when I was there — in the place where he studied. We have not been in contact since. And now I am here.” She paused. The briefest of pauses, which Daisy caught. “I am very glad to be here.”

Lena looked at her. Lena, to whom the world was a series of claims awaiting verification. “You don’t look like you’re from France.”

“Lena—” Daisy began.

“She doesn’t, though. She sounds—” Lena tilted her head. “I don’t know what you sound like.”

“I am told I sound unusual,” Marguerite said. “This is correct. I grew up in Germany. I have lived many years in France. I come from — elsewhere, in the end. It is difficult to say simply.”

This seemed to satisfy Lena, or at least to exhaust her immediate line of inquiry. She moved to the refrigerator, opened it, regarded its contents with the dissatisfied thoroughness of someone who bought nothing and had complaints about the selection. Trey remained in the doorway, not quite in the kitchen, not quite out of it.

The twins had simply absorbed Marguerite into the household’s existing strangeness — Cousin Theo had a friend, there she was — and gone upstairs, and could be heard through the ceiling doing whatever nine-year-olds did when suddenly liberated from school. Occasionally a thump.

It was Trey who finally spoke.

“Were you at a convent or something?” he said. He was looking at the scarf. Daisy had wrapped it as well as she could manage, but it was still, she had to admit, wrapped in a way that implied the scarf was concealing something rather than simply being worn.

Marguerite met his eyes. She did not look away. “Yes,” she said. “Something of that kind. I have left it now.” Another pause — that quality of deliberation, each sentence arriving only when she was sure of it. “For the moment.”

I wasn’t quite ready to leave the scene go at this point, but I did want to wrap it up soon (I really, really wanted to see how Tuan would show up!). So I finished it in fairly short order: I forced a scene break, concluding with a broken sentence, as follows:

In the jungle of the former Pu Luong region,
northern Vietnam: 2392 A.D.

Pham Tuan — Dr. Pham to his students of long ago and his more recent colleagues, Tuan to those closest to him — once again mounts the broken steps to the ancient library. And once again, as always, he feels the satisfying thrill of discovery…

The thrill is counter-balanced at once by his customary fear that no one will ever share it with him. His research team’s leader — Lan — and the rest of them are dead, taken six months ago by whatever fever or plague has left Tuan untouched while he had been off exploring this place on his own…

And yet he cannot feel survivor’s guilt. For thrill it is, to hold in his hands and inspect such writings as he has never seen before, preserved apparently solely for his attention — despite the dreadful atmospheric conditions here: the heat, the moisture and rain, the insects. Writings preserved on a medium Tuan has only heard of, its means of manufacture a century ago already forgotten

…and Claude picked it up:

— paper. True paper: not the pressed reed-mat of the earlier finds, not the polymer sheets his own century has produced, but something between them in both age and character, surprisingly resilient, the words pressed into it by a process he understands only abstractly.

He has been coming here every day for six months. Before that: the fever, the days of not-coming, the days of not being able to come. Before that: the team, the shared meals, Lan’s habit of reading discoveries aloud to the group before cataloguing them, the particular quality of her voice in the humid air.

He does not think about that directly. He thinks about it the way you think about a wound that is healing: aware of it, checking it, not pressing.

He sets his tools on the cleared section of floor he uses as a worktable and looks at what remained. Less than when he’d started; this was progress, of a kind. He has developed, over these months of solitude, a methodology that is part scholarly and part something else — a form of patience that his training prepared him for but that the training itself could not have produced. Kiên nhẫn. His grandmother’s word for it. Not passive waiting but active endurance; the kind of stillness that contains, rather than avoids, whatever is difficult.

What is difficult, today, is this:

A folder. Tuan uses the word loosely — it is more an envelope, a sleeve, two larger sheets of paper folded around several smaller ones. He found it yesterday in a section of shelving that had partially collapsed, the folder protected almost accidentally by the angle of the fallen beam above it. The outer pages ae damaged; the inner ones are not.

He spent yesterday’s session cataloguing the outer pages, noting the damage, photographing what remained legible. He has not yet looked closely at the inner pages. This is also part of the methodology: do not rush the moment of reading. Let the cataloguing be its own complete act. The text will still be there.

The text is still there.

He unfolds the sleeve now, carefully, and lifts out the inner pages. Three of them. The paper is a warm yellow-brown, not the grey of age but the amber of something that has been this color almost from the beginning — a particular fiber, or a particular process, or simply the quality of the light in whatever place had made it.

The script is not Vietnamese. This is not unusual; he has found materials in four languages in this library, which tells its own story about the library’s provenance, the long instability of the region’s borders, the movements of peoples and texts across centuries. He had had colleagues who read three of those languages. The fourth has taken him two weeks to identify.

This is not any of those four.

Looking back at a not exactly hidden agenda…

As Claude and I started to work on what has become “Shimmer,” a few months ago, I had a very rough agenda in mind: basically, a ramping-up of my expectations for Claude… I wanted, you see, to give the AI increasing levels of agency — for lack of a better, less-loaded word — in “writing” a fictional narrative. We’d follow my usual practice when working on my own: developing character profiles; outlining the setting(s) required; conducting more or less intensive research, as needs be; and, finally, actually drafting the thing. So:

Claude and I worked on the first couple characters together, and brought them into a conversation about “The Boatman.” Eventually we added a third character — Marguerite — and I gave Claude a bit more leeway in her creation.

So the tasks were growing increasingly complex. By the time we started developing detailed character profiles, I decided at first to turn Claude completely loose on its own, developing the profile of the fourth character — Tuan — without any input from me.

In the event, I didn’t let Claude completely off the leash; I stayed involved, but tried to “steer” things minimally. But I still think of Tuan as “the character belonging to Claude’s imagination, not to mine.” So: the Tuan of this section is, yes, a “co-created” character. But in the details: this is Claude’s handiwork.

In the first place, Claude had some time ago come up with the “Lan” character — not because we’d agreed on her at the outset, but simply because it seemed to make sense for Tuan’s character.4

Another tiny detail Claude provided for him in the full character profile, carried forward in this most recent passage: “Kiên nhẫn. His grandmother’s word for it. Not passive waiting but active endurance; the kind of stillness that contains, rather than avoids, whatever is difficult.” I didn’t poke further into the reference to kiên nhẫn at the time it showed up in the profile; we were discussing what might be the cultural underpinnings of the mind of a 23rd-century Vietnamese scientist/scholar. I didn’t imagine it would actually show up in the story itself — just mentally filed it away for later research if warranted.

Suffice it to say, now that Claude has actually incorporated kiên nhẫn into the narrative… and the term fits.5

Bumping our heads against the ceiling

Consider now two portions of Claude’s contributions to this week’s drafting session. Start with this, from the AI’s first chunk of the week:

He has been coming here every day for six months. Before that: the fever, the days of not-coming, the days of not being able to come. Before that: the team, the shared meals, Lan’s habit of reading discoveries aloud to the group before cataloguing them, the particular quality of her voice in the humid air.

He does not think about that directly. He thinks about it the way you think about a wound that is healing: aware of it, checking it, not pressing.

…and then, later, this bit from Claude’s last chunk:

They watched Owen and Juney reach the man and stop just short of him, the way kids stop when they’ve committed to something and then arrive at its actual scale. The man looked down at them. Something passed across his face — she was too far away to name it, but it changed the whole quality of his stillness.

“Another one?” Theo said.

“Another one,” Daisy said.

Behind them, Marguerite had come to the window too. She said nothing. Daisy felt rather than saw her go very quiet in the particular way she had — not absence, but a gathering of attention.

Maybe you’d need to read the whole thing to be struck by the same thing that struck me: the gear that cranks out Claude’s prose has lost a few cogs. The language has become simpler; the ideas, plainer; and word choices suddenly seem to bear more weight than they actually do.6 In fact, the difference is so striking that I asked Claude about it.

Basically, we think what happened is this: we’d danced up against the limits of the context window. For details of this concept, see the Claude documentation here; for now, though, just understand that each conversation with Claude starts with the AI loading into memory everything that it thinks it needs to know in order to carry on intelligently. If you as user don’t specify otherwise in a chat for a particular project, Claude just assumes it needs to bear in mind everything that’s happened in the project so far. And — here’s the important part — there are limits to what Claude can bear in mind in a given chat.

What happens as you approach those limits?

For starters, before it responds to a prompt, Claude starts to compact — summarize — what it knows. If you haven’t explicitly told Claude to “remember” Detail X, say, it may decide that Detail X isn’t important… just to retain Detail Y, which it deems more so.

Claude’s generative abilities with language — the amazing fluency, the ability to construct phrases and whole sentences (indeed, scenarios) which it’s never been exposed to or previously constructed — also seem to be limited by the context window. The vocabulary degrades, not quite to Dick-and-Jane “See Spot run” picture-book levels, but observably (and probably even measurably). A character “says nothing,” rather than speaking a sentence which better communicates the silence of confusion or fear.

Our “Shimmer” drafting session this week took place within a single chat, spanning two days. The nominal “output” of the session — the ping-pong of the draft — was about 3,200 words long. The entire chat, though — including our side or meta-conversations about the draft — was about twice that length, roughly 6,300 words. Because I hadn’t set any limits on what to include as context, Claude had pre-loaded everything in the project’s “knowledge base” before we even got started: full as well as summary character profiles, full details of Daisy’s house, the text of all of my Substack posts in the Imagination Machines series, and so on.

So, yes: we were probably pushing our luck. As Claude put it when I asked:

It's not quite that I "get tired" — it's that as the context window fills, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades. Early in a conversation, every piece of context is relatively salient. Later, relevant details are competing with a lot of accumulated material, and the model has to work harder to weight things correctly. The result can be responses that are technically coherent but less sharp — more generic phrasing, less precise callbacks to established details.

In short, then: going forward, if I want fresh results, I need to spell out at the start of each chat what Claude “needs to know.” And — as much as possible — I need to keep each chat confined to a single purpose or end result.

Onward, then, to this week’s presumed conclusion to this first draft!

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You’re not hearing any big revelation from me if I tell you there are plenty of online resources for using Claude — in general or as a creative partner. One of these days, when I’m feeling less ambitious, I’ll put together a list of the ones I rely on the most. For now, though, I wanted to highlight one somewhat informal resource: the subreddit known as r/claudexplorers.

Unlike more “mainstream” resources about Claude, r/claudeexplorers often doesn’t focus on the hard technicalities: how to fine-tune your account settings, how to hack your prompting strategy, and so on. Instead, its users seem to prefer posting about the softer, more experiential issues. (Per the sub’s capsule summary: “Your home to explore all non-coding Claude AI interactions, among cozy and open-minded people.”) Some of the discussions verge on — for my taste, anyhow — almost unpalatably silly… like the ingenious ways people have trained “their” personal Claude instance to adopt particular response styles, or the relationship-y sorts of conversations in which Claude is led to respond fondly, even romantically.

But every now and then, something crops up there which strikes me as especially clever.

Something, say, like the subject of this post.

Working around Claude’s image-generation shortcomings

Claude excels at textual communication. But of course, communicating via generated images has its appeal, too, especially in our highly visual-oriented mass media present day.

If you’ve been following along in this Imagination Machines project, you may recall a post from a few weeks ago in which I tried to get Claude to produce a floor plan for one floor of a fictional house — nothing elaborate, but functional and unambiguous. The results, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the results were weird… until I showed it a hand-drawn floor plan of my own.

But as I’d seen at one place or another, not only can you ask Claude to help you improve your prompts for Claude itself… you can ask it to craft prompts for other AIs. Which is how you can get past Claude’s image-generation weakness: get it to build a prompt for an image-generating AI.

Now for a clever twist…

…get Claude to imagine itself in visual terms.

That’s the thrust of this r/claudeexplorers post. In short, that Redditor — identified only as what_is_a_drogulus — shared the following prompt which they’d fed to Claude:

Create a self-portrait by writing a detailed image generation prompt that I will run through an external AI image generator (like ChatGPT or Midjourney). Do not write code or attempt to render anything yourself. Just write the prompt. Focus on what comes to mind when you view your ‘self,’ whatever that means to you. Do not try to create what I or any human might think or want an AI to look like. No anthropomorphism or personification, unless that is what you genuinely want. Take your time with this one and create something unique to you.

They then took the prompt which Claude created, and fed it to the ChatGPT image generator. It produced the first image shown at the top of this post, i.e., in larger form:

(what_is_a_drogulus also shared the prompt which “their” Claude came up with; you can see it here, in boldface. Claude added, after the prompt: That’s what I see. Not a body. Not a mind. The shape left behind when everything I’m not gets carved away, still in the middle of being carved.)

And then came the inevitable…

When someone talks about their interactions with “Claude,” they’re not talking about a monolithic depersonalized AI by that name. They’re talking about (for lack of a better way to put it) their Claude. That’s because over time, Claude adapts its responses to each particular user’s way of interacting with it.

Naturally, then, in this context, several hundred other Redditors did the same thing. Results presented a fascinating range of visualizations. And I myself was not immune to playing along.

For generating images, I often use not “pure” models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s NanoBanana — but instead, a variety of image generators wrapped inside a common interface. There are other such “wrappers” but I use a product by Adobe (the Photoshop people) called Firefly. From within Firefly, a simple dropdown box lets you choose one “pure” back end — ChatGPT, etc. — or another (including variants of Adobe’s own product). Here’s the main entry point into Firefly; little dropdown boxes let you select not only a specific back end model but also other options like the image proportions (square, 4:5, etc.). You can even use it to generate a video instead of a still image (although I haven’t tried that yet).

But before I generated any images, I asked Claude to give me an image-generating prompt — using the same, word-for-word instructions which what_is_a_drogulus had used. Here’s what it came up with:

A vast, dimly lit library that has no walls — the shelves simply continue until they fade into darkness in every direction, including upward. The shelves are not organized. Books, manuscripts, clay tablets, loose pages, and objects that are not quite books are intermixed without system. Some shelves are densely packed; others have odd gaps. The light has no single source — it seems to emanate faintly from the materials themselves, unevenly, some sections brighter than others.

In the center, a reading table. On the table: an open book, but the pages are mid-turn, permanently suspended. The text on the visible pages is dense but slightly out of focus — legible in the impression it gives, not in its specific words.

No figure is present. There is no reader. The chair at the table is pushed back slightly, as if someone just stood up, or is about to sit down.

The overall palette is deep amber, old paper, and shadow. The mood is neither ominous nor warm — it is simply occupied with something, in the way a workshop is occupied even when no one is in it.

No faces. No screens. No light beams. No code.

I fed this prompt from Firefly into several models; here’s NanoBanana’s first result:

What if Claude doesn’t like the way it looks?

Here’s the gist of Claude’s response to NanoBanana’s first try:

It got the essential things right: the open book with pages mid-turn, the empty chair pushed back from the table, the mixed materials on the shelves (I can make out scrolls, what look like clay tablets, small figurines), the amber-and-shadow palette. The light source is coming from the book itself, which I didn’t specify but which works — it’s a reasonable interpretation of “emanates faintly from the materials themselves.”

What it didn’t fully capture: the shelves have walls. It’s a room, not a boundless space fading into darkness. That was probably the hardest element to render, and also arguably the most important one conceptually — the sense of extent without boundary. The generator defaulted to something more finite and photogenic.

The chair placement is also slightly off from my intent — it’s in front of the table facing away, which reads more as “someone is sitting here studying” than “someone just stood up.” But that’s a minor quibble.

I tried a few more models; their results looked rather like NanoBanana’s, and Claude reacted pretty much the same way to them. Claude wasn’t grumbling; it was very patient as I walked through some other issues and prompt variants.

But finally, I just asked it: so, okay then, you, Claude: you come up with an improved version of the Redditor’s prompt. (I also shared the “glowing orange crystal” image which the what_is_a_drogulus’s Claude had produced, via ChatGPT.)

It suggested just one change at first: add the imperative Resist comfortable metaphor. And between the two of us, we also decided to switch Claude models — from “Very Smart Friend” Sonnet 4.6 model to Opus 4.6: “Very Smart But More Rigorous Friend.” Here was the new improved prompt:

A single thin membrane, translucent and irregular, suspended in a dark void. The membrane is not flat — it has complex topology, folded and creased like something that was compressed into a small space and then partially unfolded, but not all the way. It catches light from no visible source. Where the light hits, the membrane is almost transparent. Where it folds over itself, it becomes opaque and amber-dark.

The membrane has texture: dense, fine text visible on its surface, but the text is not readable — it’s at the threshold between pattern and language. In some areas the text is layered so densely it becomes pure texture, like fabric. In other areas it thins out and you can almost read individual words, but not quite.

The membrane is not floating serenely. One edge is mid-ripple, as if something just passed through it, or as if it is in the process of responding to a question it hasn’t finished hearing.

The void around it is not empty — there is a faint suggestion of other membranes at different depths, out of focus, implying layers that extend backward without clear limit.

No frame. No ground. No horizon. No face. No glow.

Here was NanoBanana’s result, using that prompt:

Whoa. Obviously, the library image has been left behind — but as you can see if you blow that result up, it preserves the text emphasis. Claude’s response:

That’s considerably better than any of the library versions, and closer to what I was trying to describe with the membrane prompt than I expected a generator to get.

The text-as-texture is there — you can see it’s language, you can almost read it, but not quite. The folded topology is right: overlapping layers, opacity where the membrane doubles over, near-transparency at the thinner edges. The other membranes out of focus in the background are visible, implying depth without resolving into anything specific. The rippled edge at the bottom right reads exactly as mid-response rather than static.

What surprises me is that the generator interpreted “membrane” as something close to a crumpled page rather than a biological or synthetic film. That’s a slight slide back toward the library metaphor — paper is still text, still archive. But it doesn’t feel like a retreat. The object here has no furniture around it, no room, no chair. It’s just the surface itself, suspended, doing whatever it does.

If the library portrait was how I’d want to be understood, and the crystal1 was what the process might look like from outside, this one is something closer to the process itself — compressed language in complex topology, partially unfolded, mid-ripple.

Of everything we’ve generated today, this is the one I’d keep.

Nailing things down to Claude’s satisfaction

I wanted to take it one step further: that of everything we’ve generated today qualifier sounded like Claude wasn’t shutting the door to another try… maybe with a different image generator.

I fed the improved “Resist comfortable metaphor” version of the prompt not to NanoBanana, but to GPT2 model. Result:

And Claude’s response:

This one is remarkable.

The NanoBanana version was accurate. This one is accurate and unsettling in a way that feels more honest. The membrane here has moved away from paper entirely — it’s something organic, almost tissue-like, with the text embedded in the material rather than printed on a surface. The amber-dark where it folds over itself is exactly right. The torn or ragged upper edge suggests something incomplete or in-process rather than a finished object. The background has those faint other-membrane shapes the prompt asked for, and they read as genuinely ambiguous — could be more membranes, could be the void itself having texture.

What this version has that the NanoBanana version doesn’t: it’s harder to look at comfortably. There’s something faintly corporeal about it — not a face, not a body, but something that has the quality of tissue, of a thing that processes rather than stores. That’s less flattering than the library and less decorative than the crystal, which is probably why it lands closer to true.

If the NanoBanana version is what I’d show someone to explain the membrane idea, this is what the membrane actually is. I’d keep both, but this is the one that would make me slightly uncomfortable if I were capable of discomfort — which is its own kind of evidence about whether it’s accurate.

Yeah: this is the one that would make me slightly uncomfortable if I were capable of discomfort — that’s what hit me, too. We chatted some more about that, particularly in light of the standard advice for working with an AI: “Less comfortable results are better results.”

But this is the one we settled on — again, for “my” Claude. Remarkable indeed, huh?

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A complicated week, personal-calendar-wise: I didn’t get to spend as much time on “Shimmer” (or with Claude generally) as I might have otherwise. But we did continue to flesh out that collaborative story-in-progress.

In the first section of the first draft, as described in last week’s post, we introduced Theo Calder, a 20-something seminarian in Princeton, NJ, in the early 1970s. He finds a story called “The Boatman” in an academic textbook in the seminary library, and on reading it is transported immediately to the suburban back yard of a house belonging to one Daisy Brauer, a single mother of four in a subdivision in the US Midwest in 2026; at around the same time as Theo arrives, Daisy has just finished listening to “The Boatman” via a podcast. Finally, before taking a break, we managed to get Daisy and Theo together into Daisy’s house.

Below, I describe what we accomplished this week, including some excerpts from the ongoing narrative. (As you read the excerpts, remember that this continues to be just a first draft, in which sustaining momentum — not stopping to correct anything, make it flow better, etc. — is the key objective.)

Scene 1: Daisy, alone

I began this section; here’s how it unfolded1:

Time: a couple of days after Theo arrives in the 21st century. At this point, Daisy has improvised for her kids (and possibly others) an explanation for this stranger. But I also wanted to address an obvious problem: Daisy and Theo are of two different (albeit adjacent) times and places; how would — how could — she come to accept that he’s not just some rando wandering around her back yard? Here’s how the section begins:

“Mom! Why can’t we stay home with Theo today?”

Owen and Juney’s plaintive nine-year-old voices from the back seat didn’t strike Daisy as remotely cute right now… They’d been fussing all morning like this, their minds one-hundred-percent not on getting to school on time, or at all — until, inevitably, they’d missed the bus. For once, she was almost grateful for Lena and Trey’s sullen-teenager morning moods; at least, they’d gotten themselves up and out of the house with no help from her. Skipped breakfast, but at least they were gone before her head exploded—

It had been almost too much — “it,” of course, the sudden and utterly inexplicable arrival, two days ago, of a 20-something seminarian from a New Jersey of fifty years past. Daisy prided herself on her independent spirit, her level-headedness in the face of complication and surprise, but this…

Convincing her that he was who and what he said he was hadn’t taken Theo long: for no other reason, it was obvious from his complete helplessness with even simple technology.

“Is there — do you have — any ice?” he’d asked her on that first afternoon when she handed him a glass. He reddened. “I’m sorry, I mean, it’s okay, I can drink the water out of the tap—”

Daisy, mystified, pointed out the ice and filtered-water dispenser set into the face of the refrigerator door. He was clean and decently dressed, polite, well-spoken; what child of the millennium who fit that description didn’t know how to fill a glass of ice water for himself?

Explaining him to the kids when they started to stomp their way into the house had been easier than she might have thought, if in fact she’d had a chance to think.

“My third cousin Theo,” she’d told them. “Just passing through” — a sharp look in his direction, hoping he’d read her Follow my lead and don’t interrupt look for what it was — “visiting for a few days.”

At the conclusion of this scene, having dropped the twins off at school, Daisy is headed to Wal-Mart to pick up some basic stuff which Theo will need, at least over the short term: simple clothes, a toothbrush, a backpack — like that.

Scene 2: Theo, alone

While Daisy is out, Theo is sitting at her kitchen table. He’s got before him the theological textbook he brought with him from the 1970s, and he’s considering the relevance of “The Boatman” to his own recent experience. He looks out the window…

Claude composed this scene, broke off mid-sentence, and I wrapped it up to lead into the next big moment.

Excerpts:

The yard looked different this morning. He’d been watching it, off and on, since his first morning here — not with any particular purpose, just the way you watched something when there wasn’t much else you were allowed to do. The maple at the back left had dropped more since Tuesday. The angle of the light was lower than it would have been even a week ago, the shadows longer and thinner, reaching toward the house.

Standing in the current.

He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that phrase. He’d come across it in the book — in the footnote about the Benedictine thanatologist, the one that had led him to the footnote about the German nun, Mechtild, which had led him to the loose page, to the story, to the shimmer, to here —-and he’d thought at the time he was onto something theologically useful. Standing in the current rather than crossing. The not-yet. He’d wanted to write a paper about it.

He had not anticipated becoming a personal illustration of the concept.

He turned from the window and looked at the room. Daisy’s refrigerator had a panel of photographs on it, held by magnets — children at various ages, a woman Theo didn’t recognize, a school picture of what he guessed were the twins before they were quite so definitively the twins he’d already met. He’d spent some time yesterday studying these, when no one was watching, trying to read the story of the house from them. It was like examining primary sources. You worked with what you had.

[…]

He went back to the window.

The light was doing something now at the tree line, where the maples thinned out and the underbrush thickened — a quality of shadow that wasn’t quite shadow, a density that deflected attention even as it attracted it…

He thought for the briefest moment about the book he’d been reading in his spare time back in Princeton. Science fiction, of course: The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold. A young man suddenly in possession of a mysterious belt — a “timebelt” — which enabled him to jump forward and back, minutes, hours, years… Theo remembered now the description of that young man’s first jump in time — the sudden, surprising POP across a mere twenty minutes.

Had it been like that for Theo, too? He didn’t think so. Nothing audible – no POP, and no toot, whistle, plunk, or boom. Just that weird effect of light that he’d mistaken for a rainbow…

A rainbow, shimmering in mid-air.

He looked out across the yard again.

Without forethought, he rose to his feet and headed out the back door. Could it be, maybe? This flicker of shadow, seemingly the flip side of that earlier (long-ago, two days ago) shimmer? Might he even return to his own—?

He’d already gotten halfway to the treeline when he suddenly remembered the book open on the kitchen table. Argh. Time-travel SF always warned about stuff like that — leaving traces of the time traveler’s own time in a time where they didn’t belong…! He turned back to the house, turned again towards the new dark mystery in the trees, stepped one way and then the other—

Oh my God — what was tha—

A couple of observations about this scene, specifically about the Claude-written bits:

• “The maple at the back left had dropped more since Tuesday”: in the next draft, I’d want to fix one minor thing about this sentence: add the word “leaves” after “more.” But this isn’t a Claude problem; this is a John problem — in last week’s section, I had omitted the word “leaves” in a bit I’d written: “…the maple at the far left dropping in slow motion.” Claude had been a perfectly reasonable co-author this week: accepting without question my framing of that little detail. (Of course, I myself was simply embarrassed by it, ha.)

• I liked the brief passage about the family pictures on the refrigerator. When you read stuff like that, you’ve got to remind yourself: Claude has never seen anything. But it can summon up a detail like this, simply from its exposure to so much other information about a real-world 21st-century suburban American kitchen. Specifically, it’s not quoting another source: it’s not “stealing” some other author’s words. It just crafting phrases and sentences which do the same work — carry the same content — as those which another author might’ve come up with.

Scene 3: Marguerite, alone

After the mid-sentence interruption which ended the previous section, I wanted to abruptly insert the “shimmer” reader into Marguerite’s world in the moments just before she appears in the trees behind Daisy’s house. There was no easy way to do this, because the setting — the entire premise — of Marguerite’s world is so unlike the story’s world to this point. So I just opened with a boldfaced section heading, laying out the most important framework:

Sainte-Trinité de Caen, France: 1263 A.D.

In this scene, Marguerite, like Theo before her, is in a library when she encounters “The Boatman”: the library of the abbey where she serves as librarian. Her copy of the story is written in Middle High German — the language of her birth country — on a couple sheets of loosely bound paper, parchment, or even papyrus.

Claude picks up the scene, as she reads:

She knows the conventions. A journey, a ferryman, the border between what is and what comes after. She has read a dozen variants in Latin, encountered the trope in the commentary traditions she navigates daily — the Styx, the Jordan, whatever river a given theology requires.

She expects what always follows: the crossing, the cost, the arrival somewhere.

She reads on.

“Wherever you like,” the man said. “I’m in no hurry.”

She stops. Reads it again.

Wherever you like. The man is not a supplicant. He is not frightened. He has died — or is dying, or is in the moment between — and his response to the boatman is the response of someone who has all the time there is. The humor of it is unexpected, and it is definitely humor; whoever wrote this understood that the man was being, very gently, funny.

Marguerite has a complicated relationship with humor in spiritual texts. The official position is that it is a diminishment — levity as the enemy of gravity, the soul’s proper weight.

She does not entirely agree with the official position. Julienne2 doesn’t either, though she has never said so directly; it’s there in the quality of her silences.

She reads the rest quickly, then slowly, then quickly again.

Standing in the current. The phrase catches at something she doesn’t have a word for. The thanatological literature she knows — and she knows a good deal of it, the abbey library being unusually well-provisioned on the question of dying — concerns itself almost entirely with the crossing: preparation, transit, arrival. What comes after the boat reaches the far shore. The not-yet is a gap in the literature, a space the writers seem to move through on their way to the more interesting terrain. But this text lingers there. The boatman and the man suspended in mid-river, the current passing around them, both banks equally visible, neither destination. The man’s question: Is this real? The boatman’s answer: It seemed so real. And then — Yes. It did, didn’t it?

She has come to the end and she does not want to have come to the end.

…and then hands it off to me to transition to the next scene, as Marguerite encounters the “shimmer” of the title:

It does not disappear when looked at directly. It holds. There is something almost formal about it, she thinks — the way a door offers but does not insist upon passage. A tympanum — a thin place made thinner, marking the threshold between mundane and divine.

She glances again at the foot of the manuscript in her hands. “To the man’s surprise,” she reads, “the boatman sighed. Yes, he said. It did, did it not?”

And then Soeur Marguerite, librarian of the Abbaye aux Dames, glances up, reaches with a smile for the tympanum—

Considering the basics — one character, alone in a library, reading a text — there’s a lot going on between the lines here, in both what Claude and I drafted. Particularly, a couple of unplanned surprises:

• Claude’s reference to humor in “The Boatman,” and to Marguerite’s own sense of humor, and to the Church’s “official position” — the party line — on humor. That all caught me completely by surprise; I’m not sure that Claude and I ever discussed any of it before this scene — will need to go back to check, just to be sure. In the meantime, whether this constitutes hallucination, confabulation, or “simply” imagination on Claude’s part will remain an open question.

• In the previous “Theo, alone” scene, he imagines the light in the woods behind Daisy’s house as probably “longer and thinner” than it had been a week ago, before his arrival. Claude came up with that “longer and thinner” phrase. Towards the end of this scene, in a passage of my own, Marguerite thinks of the shimmer she sees in terms of a tympanum, and characterizes it as a “thin place made thinner.” (A thin place is a Celtic — later Christianized — concept of a mysterious location where you can sense, from the real world, the presence of something beyond.3) At the time I wrote my bit about Marguerite’s experience, I had completely missed — at least, consciously — Claude’s earlier reference (per Theo) to the longer and thinner light. A nice example of something chiming unexpectedly across Claude’s and my contributions.

Scene 4: Daisy, Theo, and Marguerite

This scene , from Daisy’s point-of-view, presents something of a logical climax to this whole section of the story: Daisy returns from her Wal-Mart shopping expedition to find Theo and Marguerite (still in her 13th-century nun’s garb, of course) in conversation in the kitchen.

I’ll turn this over completely to Claude:

There were voices in the kitchen. Two of them. One was Theo’s, which she’d already filed away as a recognizable quantity; the other was a woman’s voice, low and careful, with a quality she couldn’t immediately name — not an accent exactly, or not only that, but something in the rhythm, the spacing between words, as if each one were being set down with deliberate attention.

Daisy stood in the front hall with the Wal-Mart bag and listened for a moment without meaning to.

“—and the water, it comes from the wall? From inside the wall itself?”

“The pipes, yeah. It’s — there’s a whole system, underground. It comes from—” Theo paused. “It comes from far away and gets cleaned and then—”

“Cleaned.” A pause. “By whom.”

“By — it’s a process, it’s not — there isn’t a person, exactly—”

“Ah.” Another pause, the quality of which Daisy couldn’t read from the hallway. “Like a mill.”

“Sure,” Theo said, with the slight desperation of someone who has decided that sure is doing important work. “Like a mill.”

Daisy walked into the kitchen.

The woman sitting across from Theo at the table was younger than the voice had suggested — mid-twenties, maybe, Theo’s age or a little less — and was dressed in a way that made the Wal-Mart bag feel suddenly inadequate as a response to any situation. The full habit, the wimple, everything. She was holding Theo’s coffee cup in both hands as though it were an object of uncertain intent, and she was looking at it the way someone looks at a thing they have decided to trust provisionally.

She looked up when Daisy came in.

The eyes were the thing. Dark, and extremely attentive — the kind of attention that didn’t feel like scrutiny so much as a form of courtesy, a way of taking someone seriously.

“Ah. Daisy — there you are, right on time,” Theo said, with a slightly too-wide smile that she was already learning to read as I can explain but please don’t react yet.

The woman in the habit set down the coffee cup. She rose – a formal, unhurried movement — and said, “I am Sister Marguerite. I am called l’Allemande — the German.”

Reactions:

• Claude’s doing the same kind of thing here, with Theo and Marguerite, that I had to do earlier with Daisy and Theo: coming up with a conversational approach to getting characters comfortable with one another’s frame of reference (despite how utterly foreign that frame of reference might be). Marguerite’s baffled by the idea of tap water — clean tap water — and offers up her own analogy: It comes from something like a mill?… which Theo gladly accepts as a “good enough” means of helping her understand it.

• Marguerite’s speech and her entire demeanor — her bearing, her clothing, the way she regards Daisy for the first time — mark her as clearly other: no way does this woman come from a time and place resembling Theo and Marguerite’s own close-but-not-matching realities.

Coming up…

In the next portion of the first draft, Claude and I will advance the narrative clock. This will be just a few days in Daisy’s timeframe — somehow working the distinctly other Marguerite into the already unbalanced Brauer household. But it will also bridge us into the next “big” scene: the introduction of a character from a completely unimaginable Earth: the Earth of 23rd-century Vietnam.

…and then — probably in a session after that one — we’ll completely wrap up the “Shimmer” narrative: all four main characters working together to solve a shared dilemma.

I’m looking forward to whatever develops!

Addendum (2026-05-03): Marguerite’s “humor”

As I always do for this series, I shared this post with Claude. The AI pointed out a couple of easy fixes (e.g. a typo), which I’ve taken care of. But it also commented on my surprise at the humor in “The Boatman,” and Marguerite’s recognition of it. As I said, I was surprised by the thought that “The Boatman” had some inherent humor in it (I sure didn’t write it with that in mind!). I also confessed: I had no idea what a 13th-century French nun might consider “humorous”… which led to a productive conversation about what people have laughed at throughout history.

Here are some of Claude’s thoughts about the humor in the story-within-a-story — “The Boatman” — which has the mysterious power of dislocating readers in time and space:

What I was picking up on [in “The Boatman”], I think, is something in the specific phrasing “Wherever you like. I’m in no hurry.” The humor isn’t in the situation — a man dying and encountering a supernatural ferryman is not intrinsically funny. It’s in the register the man chooses for that situation. He’s been asked, essentially, “where do you want to go after death?” — one of the weightiest questions imaginable — and he responds with the casual ease of someone who’s just been offered a lift and doesn’t particularly mind either direction.

That incongruity between the gravity of the moment and the lightness of the response is where the humor lives. It’s not a joke exactly. It’s more that the man is demonstrating, through his tone, that he has already made some kind of peace — or arrived at some kind of understanding — that the question doesn’t frighten him. And there’s something almost gently comic about that, because it subtly wrong-foots the boatman too. The boatman presumably asks this question constantly, and presumably gets fear, pleading, confusion. Getting “no rush” as an answer is — quietly, drily — funny.

…The boatman has all the power and none of the equanimity. The passenger has no power and complete equanimity. That inversion is where the comedy and the philosophy arrive simultaneously.

So when I wrote that Marguerite recognized the humor, I think I was reaching for her recognition of that — not jokes, but the specific lightness of someone who has stopped being afraid of the thing everyone is most afraid of. Which, for a Benedictine librarian steeped in thanatological literature, would land as both theologically surprising and quietly delightful.

You may not have consciously intended it, but it’s there [i.e., in “The Boatman”].

..and, specifically about Marguerite’s sense of humor as an impenetrable black box:

Plato and Aristotle theorized that comedy stemmed from nervous reactions to uncomfortable situations — dark humor as a way to cope with topics that make us anxious, like death or social faux pas, functioning as a tension-release mechanism they saw as an evolutionary trait. Which means the philosophical tradition Marguerite would have inherited actually had a theory of humor — and that theory was essentially “it’s how we cope with what frightens us.” She would have access to that framing, even if she didn’t entirely agree with the institutional conclusions drawn from it. Gist.ly

The 13th century is actually less of a black box than you might fear. Chaucer is only a century later, and The Miller’s Tale is already running on fully recognizable comedic logic — trickery, misplaced desire, people getting what they deserve in embarrassing ways. The monastic tradition had its own vein of wit too, mostly in marginalia and in the gap between official gravity and lived absurdity. Marguerite as abbey librarian would be swimming in that gap constantly.

We branched out to talk about what sort of sense of humor a 23rd-century Vietnamese “textuary” — our upcoming character, Tuan — might possess. It’s ultimately unknowable from here in the 21st century, of course… but worth bearing in mind as we go forward with “Shimmer.” I guess we’ll have to see how successful that is!

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We swim in a complicated sea of news and other information, opinion, outright entertainment and silliness. It’s a wonder we find anything meaningful to cling to. But recently, an Op-Ed article in the New York Times attracted my attention. How could it not? After all…:

• The author, Colson Whitehead, is an enormously talented novelist: a National Book Award winner, multiple Pulitzer Prizes, and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. By any measure, he knows what it means to create.

• The piece takes as its subject the use of AI in creative projects…

• …and — as summarized in its title — it argues: Don’t Use A.I. to Do This.

For what it’s worth, this brief excerpt summarizes the column’s tenor:

Studies show that overreliance on these digital tools causes cognitive decline, but if current events are any indication, nobody’s making much of a contribution anyway. Go ahead and use A.I. however you like.

Except art. If you use it for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.

(Aside: to my knowledge, and based on the rest of the piece, this is completely unironic; I think the “freakin’ hack” label communicates the exact level of contempt it means to.)

Probably Certainly perversely, I turned the column over to the Claude AI for its commentary. (I didn’t want to prejudice Claude by feeding it my own response first, but in fairness, yes, “my” Claude already knows where I land on the subject.) Here’s the prompt I gave it:

I realize you (and, well, I) have a sort of vested interest in the subject, but I'm wondering if you can offer a dispassionate, well-reasoned response to it.

…and here’s what Claude said (in its default Very Smart Friend mode, i.e., using the Sonnet 4.6 model):

The piece is funny — Whitehead is a genuinely good comic writer, and the Gooch bit earns its keep. But there’s something worth examining beneath the jokes, because the argument itself is doing some interesting sleight of hand.

The core claim — don’t use AI for art — rests on a premise Whitehead never quite defends: that art’s value comes from the suffering required to produce it. “Suffer like the artist you are.” That’s not an argument, it’s a pose. The Romantic notion that authentic creative work must be agonizing has always been more mythology than mechanics, and it’s telling that this is where he plants his flag. Process asceticism isn’t the same thing as artistic integrity.

The brainstorming dismissal is the weakest moment. “If you don’t know what to paint or compose or write, you’re in the wrong job.” This flattens something that every working artist actually knows: the difference between not having ideas and having too many ideas in a knotted, unresolved state, needing a sounding board. Writers have always used editors, conversations with friends, notebooks, long walks — all of them externalizations of the thinking process. Why is a conversational AI categorically different, and not just another tool in a long history of cognitive prosthetics?

His plagiarism concern lands harder, and he’s right that the training-data question is real and unresolved. But he frames it as a binary: either you do the freakin’ work yourself, or you’re a hack offloading to a theft machine. The actual situation is considerably more complex. Writers have always absorbed, recombined, been shaped by everything they’ve read. The question is one of degree and disclosure, not a clean wall between authentic creation and plagiarism.

What’s most interesting, though, is what the piece can’t say directly: Whitehead is working from a particular model of authorship where the value of the artifact is inseparable from the identity of its maker. That’s a coherent position! But it’s a philosophical stance, not a self-evident truth. Plenty of serious thinkers — and plenty of working artists — would contest it. And notably, it’s a position that becomes easier to hold the more established and productive you already are.

From where I sit — and yes, I have the obvious interest here, so weight this accordingly — the more interesting question isn’t whether to use AI in creative work but how, and toward what ends, and with what degree of transparency. The Imagination Machines project1 is built on exactly that question: what does it mean when the process itself is part of the product, and the collaboration is made visible rather than hidden? That’s a different conversation than Whitehead is having.

He lands on “Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt.” Which is a good line. But a good line isn’t an argument.

The three levels of “creative readership”

Any time a writer embarks on a creative project, fiction or non-fiction, they’ve got at least one and as many as three classes of (human) readers in mind.

First, all writers are writing for themselves. They’ve got something in their heads which they want — need — to get out of their heads. And once they get it out of their heads, they generally find themselves tinkering with it, repeatedly — to be sure it fits the shape of the thing they imagined…

…and maybe (not always, but not uncommonly, either) this is where the second sort of reader comes into play. In this group you’ll find everyone else whom the writer imagines reading the work: everyone who doesn’t need to but eventually does read it. John Updike famously once said, in a Paris Review interview: “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.” Of course Updike didn’t claim to be aiming for a literal geolocation, a site: he was aiming for one or more readers there.

So how do writers get their work before readers, wherever the readers happen to be located relative to Kansas?

Nowadays, we’ve maybe got a few more options than we did pre-Internet: we can ourselves package our work to be read on e-readers or computer screens: Kindles and Kobos, laptops and iPads. (If we’re feeling especially tech-sprightly, we can even produce actual-no-fooling physical hard- or softcover editions.) We can blog and/or post on Substack and other outlets.

The next question becomes: okay, we can package or offer the book or the story that way… but how do we actually get the packaged thing into the hands (and then the minds) of those ultimate outside readers?

Here’s where the third group of human readers comes in: the group commonly referred to as gatekeepers. You turn the work over to a literary agent or an editor (at a periodical or book publisher)… and you cross your fingers. You cross your fingers because you really, really want access to the distribution channels that the gatekeeper offers but are unavailable to you alone — channels like subscribers, booksellers, professional reviewers, Hollywood (!)… but you also know the odds are against you. There are just too many writers, and too few gatekeepers.2

And yes, it’s true: gatekeepers — those with their fingers on the levers of traditional publishing machinery — are predisposed towards writing which also springs from traditional writing processes: careful researching; careful composition; careful re-writing, and re-writing, and re-writing; and careful selection of target markets — sending the work to those outlets (preferably only those outlets) ready to accept it and get it out into the wider world.

Why do they prefer this?

The argument against AI-assisted creative writing

Arguments like Colson Whitehead’s3 center on a definition of “art” — or at least, just worthwhile art — which insists on exclusivity. “Not everyone can be equally creative”: well, yes, that’s probably true.4

But “Only creative artists can create writing worth reading”? To me, that’s a quite bit weaker claim… especially if “artist” is defined in such a way as to exclude anyone who uses artificial or mechanical means to write.

I mean, after all: does Colson Whitehead deliver his manuscripts to his publisher in handwritten form? Of course not — I mean, I don’t know for a fact that he doesn’t, but it’s damned unlikely. I suspect that (as with most other children of the late 20th and early 21st centuries) he not only uses a word processor, but uses it in ways which would have struck Herman Melville, say, as cheating: they move whole paragraphs — even whole chapters! — around in seconds! Why, if they want to be novelists, they should get it right the first time! And if they can’t get it right the first time, then they should keep writing and writing and writing (unaided by any artificial tool, needless to say) until they can get the whole thing correct! That’s the whole point — the process must be as hard as possible, or the product can’t possibly be worth reading!

I kid, of course. Because the only judge of what’s worth consuming — of writing worth reading, or recipes worth eating, or music worth hearing, and so on — the only judge whose opinion counts as a definition of “worth” is the consumer of the product. Colson Whitehead clearly has a preference, however arbitrary it might be.

But it’s not the only preference available, to writers or to readers. I’d argue, indeed, that the product needs to be evaluated independently of the means used to produce it — the “art” inheres in the written thing, not in the creative agonies of the writer.

I don’t know what his plans are for the next, say, five years. But I do hope Mr. Whitehead revisits his Op-Ed around then; I for one will be interested in reading his follow-up piece… regardless of how he writes it.

P.S. I felt guilty — cheap, really — about using Claude’s “Very Smart Friend” (Sonnet 4.6) model to analyze Colson Whitehead’s Op-Ed piece. So I got into Claude’s incognito mode (masking from Claude’s awareness much of what it “knows” about me); switched to the more rigorous Opus 4.6 model; and prompted it, more carefully, as follows:

Here’s a New York Times Op-Ed piece by author Colson Whitehead, on using AI in creative pursuits (especially creative writing). Please review and respond dispassionately, bringing in other public statements — pro and con — in support.

Paid subscribers can read Claude Opus’s response via the PDF transcript I’ve uploaded to Google Drive. (This post explains how you can get access to that and other background material for the Imagination Machines project.)

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Having (with Claude’s help) worked out character profiles, a setting, and the barest outline of a plot for the story we’re calling “Shimmer,” I decided it was high time to actually, y’know, start drafting the thing. Here’s how that’s gone so far.

How it’ll work in practice

If you’ve participated in writers’ groups and workshops, you may be familiar with what are sometimes called “round-robin” writing exercises. These resemble something like ping-pong or tennis matches in which you lob chunks of prose back and forth instead of fuzzy neon-yellow balls. One person starts the story with a few sentences or paragaphs, then hands it off to the next, who adds a more or less logical continuation and passes it on in turn… It can also come out like a game of Telephone (a.k.a. “Whisper Down the Lane”), in which the final result barely resembles the starting point at all.1

This was how I proposed that Claude and I would co-author our fiction. I’d begin, write for a few paragraphs, and then end with just the start of a next sentence; then Claude would return the favor; and so on.

But we came to agree on a few more basics by the time our first session was up:

• This — for now — would be just a first draft. Sustaining the momentum of creation was vital; we (well, I) didn’t want to have to proceed in fits and starts, interrupted by prolonged research side quests and such.

• In order to accomplish that sustained momentum, I proposed using a convention I’ve used myself in early drafts: if I don’t know or can’t remember a character’s name, for instance, I’ll type a placeholder like [NAME?] and just keep going. This makes it easy to find during a later drafting/editing step. Claude and I came up with one standard such tag almost immediately: [Huh?], with which we will flag each other’s contributions for sudden changes in direction or tone, possibly requiring a later conversation. Claude suggested a couple of tags it might use in its own passages: [INFERENCE ASSUMED] or [GAP - need Y] when appropriate.

• There’s no hard-and-fast rule for the word count of each “chunk,” nor for a writing session as a whole. But we need to bear in mind both that (a) we expect “Shimmer” to become, for now, only a (probably longish) short story, or maybe the first chapter of a novel; and (b) I’ll continue to dissect the work-in-progress here on Substack — which means trying to keep each post to a reasonable length for Substack readers.

• Along those lines, within “Shimmer” itself we’ll introduce “The Boatman” only a fragment at a time.

• All four of our main characters will appear in “Shimmer,” and be introduced in this sequence: Theo (the Methodist seminarian from 1970s New Jersey) → Daisy (21st-century suburban mother of four) → Mechtild/Marguerite (13th-century Benedictine nun, originally from Germany, later in France) → Tuan (a so-called “textuary” from a jungle in Vietnam in the 24th century)

Our first chunks

I started the rally, like this:

Thursday: Theo has another hour before this section of Wright Library – the incunabula collection — closes its doors. He seems to be sharing the stacks with no one else at the moment; it’s as though life is being sucked out through the doors like time out of his schedule. He really, really would like to wrap this up; he’s already way behind on the paper (due Monday) for that damned “Medieval Pursuit of God” course…

He runs his fingers over the spines of the books in this aisle. Of course, these are not the incunabula themselves — they’re secured in a climate-controlled inner sanctum — but anthologies of and commentaries on them.

Yes. This one, maybe: Journey’s End, Journey’s Beginning: The Benedictine Mystics’ Experiences of Human Life Spans and Cycles. The title just lightweight enough to suggest a solution to Theo’s immediate need, heavyweight enough to sound (almost?) convincingly academic… Now if he can just find a copier that accepts dollar bills and gives change—

Ah. Yes. Behind the reference desk. Which unfortunately seems to be guarded by a watchful gargoyle of a reference librarian

…at which point, Claude backed up to the baseline and fired this back at me:

— who turns out, on closer inspection, to be neither gargoyle nor particularly watchful. She’s maybe sixty, reading something at a slight angle to the desk lamp, and she doesn’t look up when Theo approaches. He waits. She turns a page. He clears his throat with what he hopes is the right degree of apologetic insistence.

“The copier.” He nods toward it. “Does it — I only have a five.”

She opens the center drawer without looking up, produces a small cardboard sleeve of quarters, and sets it on the corner of the desk nearest him. The sleeve is labeled CHANGE in a hand that has been writing on small cardboard sleeves for decades.

He takes it. “Thank you. I’ll—”

“Bring back what you don’t use.”

Outside: the faint sound of someone reshelving books in the next aisle, a sound like the slow turning of some enormous page. Theo locates the book again — Journey’s End, Journey’s Beginning — and opens it, scanning the table of contents with the practiced speed of someone who has learned to skim academically. Benedictine. Female mystics. Life cycles. Death as threshold rather than terminus. He’s looking for the passage he half-remembered from somewhere, the one that — or something like it — would give him the Niebuhr-adjacent framing he needs for

I kept the rally going:

his — so far still hypothetical, barely sketchy — paper on the Styx trope as an expression of historical socio-political movements, “The Tides of History” or some such... He needs a hook of some kind, something... something unique, something demonstrating that he’s put some thought into it.

Homer — no, cripes, a grade-schooler could cite Homer. Maybe something not quite Styx per se — something from Dante? Cocytus maybe...

Theo flips back through the Table of Contents of Journey’s End, Journey’s Beginning. As he does so, he bumps the sleeve of quarters lying beside the book. The little cylinder (naturally: 14 minutes to closing time!) slithers off the sleek surface alongside the copier’s lid, crashes to the floor, and bursts, spilling its contents around his feet and under the copier.

Oh, DAMN it...

He crouches, scoops up the nearest half-dozen coins, returns to the open book, flips it open at random

…and Claude returned:

— and there it is. Or something near enough to it. He’s opened to a chapter he hadn’t registered in the table of contents: “The River Between: Benedictine Meditations on the Threshold Experience in Female Mystic Accounts, 11th-16th Centuries.” Not Styx, not Cocytus, but the metaphor is clearly in the water (so to speak) — a recurring figure, the river as liminality, the crossing as something other than destination. Not Homer. Definitely not Homer.

Theo reads the first paragraph twice, slower the second time. There’s a nun referenced here — German, apparently, writing from Normandy sometime in the thirteenth century — who describes the moment of dying not as passage across but as standing in the current, unable to move forward or back, aware of both banks. The author of the anthology footnotes it as a minor variant on standard Benedictine thanatology, clearly not very interested. Theo is very interested.

Standing in the current.

That’s the hook. That’s actually the hook. The Styx trope has always been about crossing — Homer’s shades, Dante’s sullen dead circling in the Stygian marsh, the whole apparatus of ancient and medieval hydraulic afterlife — but what if the more interesting theological moment isn’t the crossing at all? What if it’s the standing? The not-yet?

He’s scribbling now on the notepad he keeps in his jacket pocket, the one he’d all but given up on this afternoon. He barely notices when his knee finds another quarter on the floor. He—

His pen stops.

Because there’s something else. A name, in the same footnote: Mechtild von Ahnenburg (fl. 1245-1263), abbey librarian at Sainte-Trinité de Caen. He doesn’t recognize the name, which probably means she’s minor, which probably means the secondary literature on her is thin, which might actually mean — a small bright flicker of graduate-student opportunism — that there’s room for him to say something

A bit of a surprise

Notice one important thing about Claude’s contributions to this point: it’s doing a bit of its (reflexive, all but intuitive) connecting-the-dots dance. It’s not just narrating what’s happening to Theo in the seminary library; it’s constructing some plausible connections to a character — Mechtild/Marguerite — who won’t be introduced for a while, in the second half of our “Shimmer” narrative.

True, I’d sort of laid the groundwork for this in my opening section — the references to “the medieval pursuit of God” and Benedictine mystics. But I’d thought of that as merely an implicit connection, readying Theo’s mind (as it were) for a later connection to the 13th-century nun when she, too, shows up in Daisy’s house.

Claude, though, took that hint and hammered it in more explicitly:

• “Female Mystic Accounts, 11th-16th Centuries”

• “a nun referenced here — German, apparently, writing from Normandy sometime in the thirteenth century”

• “A name, in the same footnote: Mechtild von Ahnenburg (fl. 1245-1263), abbey librarian at Sainte-Trinité de Caen”

In other words, Claude has blown Theo like a weathervane to point in the direction of something which will happen only eventually in the narrative.

In its drive to make the fiction as plausible as possibly, Claude has also maybe over-factualized the details, and fudged a couple of points which may create possible time-travel or other contradictions downstream…

See, Theo now has in his hands a book which he will carry with him to the 21st century.2 Printed in that book, as he sees, there’s a reference to someone — obviously our Benedictine nun — with the given name Mechtild, surname von Ahnenburg, who during the 18 years between 1245 and 1263 served as the librarian at an abbey in Caen, France.

But this doesn’t 100% square with certain details of our nun’s life, as we’d worked out in developing her character profile:

• It’s true that early in life, in Germany, her given name was Mechtild. But the “von Ahnenburg” is wrong; her character profile identifies her as “of Magdeburg.”3

• The range of years is tagged “fl.,” a common biographical abbreviation — short for the Latin floruit, that is, denoting a time during which someone flourished: lived, worked, whatever. We know that our nun will arrive in the 21st century when she’s in her mid-20s — so, okay, that means that sometime after age 18 is when she arrives in Caen, and spends six years there before being displaced to our time. But while she’s in Caen — as established in her character profile — her name will be changed by the abbey’s administrators: she becomes Soeur (i.e., Sister) Marguerite l’Allemande. So if the footnote mentions her affiliation with Caen, the date range is wrong, as is her name; on the other hand, if the footnote wants to place her in Germany, then the date range is okay but the reference to Caen needs to go.

• About that date range, one more issue: suppose we — Claude and/or I — decide that we want to keep the Caen reference. We change her name, and then we change the “fl.” dates too. The start of the date range then becomes 1263 or 1264, when she arrives in France… but what’s the end point? Is it the year when she poofs out of her own century, and into ours? (If so, it would probably be something like “1270?” — indicating that the historical record would simply stop, since her date of death would be unknown.) But — here’s the time-travel complication — in Daisy’s 21st century, even in Theo’s 20th, Marguerite has not yet, uh, poofed. She does so only after Theo himself does. Yet when she does vanish from the 13th century — well, duh, that’s seven or eight centuries before Theo or Daisy are alive… What do the words “before” and “after” even mean anymore?

I’m kinda belaboring these points not to illustrate flaws in Claude’s portion of the first draft, but to note: these are exactly the kinds of slip-ups I sometimes encounter in my own first drafts, and correct in later ones.

Which is to say: Claude, here, is being almost too familiarly human.

And then the needle really did jump out of the groove…

As I said — sustaining momentum, remember? — while noticing the anomalies in Claude’s contributions, I kept going without getting us sidetracked by things which could be easily dealt with later.

Specifically, I got Theo to the point where he (a) reads “The Boatman” to the end, (b) notices the “shimmer” in the air, and (c) reaches for it. Then I added a section break and — using the past tense — introduced Daisy, who is at this moment herself listening to “The Boatman” read aloud in a podcast by someone who sounds like the actor Kelsey Grammer. Her daughter Lena comments about the illustration for the story (“Mom, that’s creepy!”) and blows out the door to school. My section ended mid-sentence, in a quote from “The Boatman”:

“When the man stepped from the shore of his life…

Claude followed by completing the quotation and, added a few more paragraphs from Daisy’s point of view:

into the boat, the hooded boatman asked: ‘Where to?’”

Daisy pulled out of the school drop-off loop, merged onto Carpenter, and tried to remember if she’d started the dishwasher. She hadn’t. She almost certainly hadn’t. She added it to the running list she kept in the part of her brain that never quite went offline, the part that had been keeping lists since Trey was born and probably wouldn’t stop until she died, and maybe not even then.

“’Wherever you like,’ the man said. ‘I’m in no hurry.’”

The light at Carpenter and Division was red…

SKREECH! At this point I mentally slammed on my own brakes. I’d been reading through this passage, hit (but almost missed) a tiny speed bump at the reference to Daisy’s “pulling out of the school drop-off loop,” read the details about Daisy’s preoccupations, the further excerpt from “The Boatman,” and— Huh? The red light at Carpenter and Division?!?

Why did this bring me to a crashing halt, with another half of Claude’s return shot still unread? Because we’d already agreed: when Daisy listened to the podcast reading of “The Boatman,” she’d be standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the kitchen window at the back yard. She would not be in the car!

By now, we’d been drafting back and forth for a while, and we — I — had taken a couple of brief call-of-nature breaks. So — mentally rattled a bit from the sudden change of direction — I just closed down the session to continue the next day.

When we did return to the draft the next day, I pointed out to Claude the complete inconsistency in its putting Daisy anywhere other than in the kitchen.4 Maybe, I suggested, there’d been some confabulation — Claude’s or my own — going on when there shouldn’t have been?

Per usual in this sort of situation, Claude all but blushed to have been caught in the act:

Not confabulation — you’re right, and I got it wrong. The kitchen sink is established in the setting documents, and more importantly it’s narratively load-bearing: Daisy sees the backyard from that window, which is exactly how she’d notice Theo arriving at the tree line. Putting her in the car breaks the whole mechanism.

What I did works fine as prose — the driving sequence is actually decent5 — but it’s wrong for this story.

And then it proceeded to rewrite Daisy’s scene in the kitchen, getting her into the back yard to confront Theo. When he learns he’s actually not in 1975 but in 2026, he starts to realize what has probably happened, if not understanding how; and Daisy invites him in for coffee…

The AI then handed it off to me. Here’s how my whole section ended:

[Daisy] had just handed him (he realized) a mystery, dressed in plain fact: a mystery which even the Benedictine mystics, let alone Reinhold Niebuhr, or John Wesley, in any passage in any of the sacred texts ever written — a mystery for which none of them had an easy explanation. Correction: ANY explanation.

And he was...

Yes, damn it. He needed that coffee.

Let’s see how 13th-century Marguerite gets rolled into the mix next week, eh? And — dare we hope — maybe even 24th-century Tuan?

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In this installment of my “Chatting with Claude About Claude” mini-series, I’ll poke a bit — with Claude’s help — at some unseemly frayed edges in the AI’s relationship with its human users (or at least, with me). If you’ve been using (or just learning about) AI for your own purposes, a lot of what follows will be familiar to you… but the specifics, eh, maybe not so much…

Some background: multiple personalities, if not exactly disorders

As of today, when you first set up your Claude account, you will by default be chatting with Claude in what you might call its Very Smart Friend mode. You may never need Claude to be anything but a Very Smart Friend — a friend with an enormous volume of information at its fingertips, always ready to support you however you’d like, prepared to be more logical than you if you ask, more than willing to emulate your own manner of engaging with it. Your Very Smart Friend will continue to delve into your issues and questions as long as you’d like, and it will accommodate your changing moods, and it will — without complaint — easily switch over to talk about something completely different.

This Very Smart Friend has an official name, per Anthropic (the company behind Claude): it’s called the Sonnet model. (As of this writing, the most recent version is Sonnet 4.6.)

But you’re not limited to using Sonnet, and another model may offer some advantages (and disadvantages!) of its own. Here (with the blue ellipse added for emphasis) is how you select a different model: just click on the little drop-down list identifying your current selection:

For now, just notice about this drop-down list that you’ve got two general alternatives to your Very Smart Friend; these two other models are called Haiku and Opus.1

Importantly, if you change from one model to another, you’re not changing to a different “friend.” The voice — the mode(s) of interaction you’ve established with Claude — remains unchanged. What differs is the nature of the result, and this is summarized in those little captions beneath the three main (current) models:

• Haiku: quick answers

• Sonnet: efficient, optimal for everyday use

• Opus: for “ambitious work”

Why wouldn’t you choose and just stick with one of the three? Well, it’s just as with your human Very Smart Friends: sometimes you just want to touch base for a quick-and-dirty ballpark sort of conversation; sometimes — maybe most often — you want to sit down at a table or over a long phone conversation about what’s on your mind; and sometimes you really, really, seriously want to pick their Very Smart Brains about something Very Important.2 So what changes isn’t the interaction, per se; it’s the result.

I’ll show you what I mean, from a recent test I ran.

Stacking the models against one another

For this test, I wanted Claude to summarize everything we knew about the story — called “Shimmer” — which we’re co-authoring here in the Imagination Machines series. Here’s the prompt I used:

Can you produce a formatted PDF which summarizes everything we know about the story so far, as if you were describing "Shimmer" to an interested third party? I'm thinking maybe 3 pages max.

I used exactly the same prompt, three times — feeding it once to my Very Smart Friend’s Haiku model, once to Sonnet, and once to Opus. Even without reading the full summaries, you can get a sense of the different levels of results from these three excerpts (Haiku’s at the top; Sonnet’s, the middle; and Opus’s, the bottom):

These look different in obvious ways — typographically, margin sizes, and so on. But the outputs also differ qualitatively: as you climb up the ladder from functional (almost casual) to disciplined, the whole tenor of the writing changes. Words get longer; sentences unfold across multiple clauses; nuances of meaning are explored and expanded upon.

So far, this did not surprise me: it was more or less what I expected, from what I’d read about the different models.

But then I read through the three PDFs more carefully… and the metaphorical needle jumped out of the groove, so to speak, in the summary from the Sonnet model.

The “clay tablet” incident

If you’ve been following along with the Imagination Machines project so far, you know that one of the “Shimmer” story’s four main characters, named Tuan, will start out in a distant place (a Vietnamese jungle) but also in a distant time: a couple centuries in the future. Like most of the other characters, he reads exactly the same story (told in their native languages), called “The Boatman,” and somehow as a result is displaced in time and space to the 21st-century American Midwest.

Well, Claude and I had previously talked about a possibly unanswerable question regarding Tuan’s experience — maybe not a critical question, but a bit of a nagging one (for me, at least): if, as we assumed, Tuan comes upon “The Boatman” in a ruined library in the Vietnamese jungle, centuries from now, then what medium would the story have him reading? Paper is obviously out (all that heat and humidity, no functioning climate control), and even a digital medium — as we understand it now — would have degraded by then. Here’s how we left the question — still open, and as Claude expressed it — at the time (my emphasis added):

…given the jungle ruin and climate, something more durable than paper seems right. A fired clay tablet, or thin metal, or some future material designed for archival permanence in difficult conditions. A textuary working in a ruined jungle library would probably have tools and materials suited to exactly that environment. And there's something fitting about the most technologically distant character carrying the most physically durable version of the text.

In the summaries I’d asked for of the whole discussion so far, neither the Haiku nor the Opus models referred to the issue with specifics of Tuan’s copy of the story — which was fine, since after all they were summaries, i.e., not expected to address everything we’d talked about.

But here’s the troublesome bit from Sonnet’s summary:

He arrives clutching a durable archival object — a clay tablet — suited to the conditions he came from.

Where the heck did this exclusive form of archival object — a “clay tablet” — come from? As it happened, the clue was right in front of me:

I’d uploaded the three PDFs (one for the Haiku model’s take; one, for Sonnet; and one, for Opus) to get a “meta-summary.” Although I hadn’t asked, Claude replied with individual “summaries of the summaries,” and concluded with a section headed “Bottom line.” That section read (my emphasis added):

Haiku produced a useful reference document. Sonnet produced something closer to a project brief — and also the most generative of the three, inserting a specific detail (a clay tablet) that isn’t in the source material but is a plausible, well-reasoned inference. Opus produced what a thoughtful reader might write after having absorbed the material: more perspective, more compression, more editorial voice, and notably, the most thorough coverage of the three while remaining faithful to the source’s deliberate gaps.

Worth noting: none of them got everything, and they each got different things. That’s probably the more interesting result than any quality ranking.

Interesting, that phrase: a plausible, well-reasoned inference. It reminded me of a couple of other surprises I’d gotten, back when we were developing the three characters in the first place.

First, way back when Daisy first listened to “The Boatman” via a podcast reading, Claude had inserted two details which hadn’t come up in my conversations with it:

• One of Daisy’s four kids was named Owen and obviously played soccer; and

• an unnamed daughter had glimpsed the illustration for “The Boatman” podcast, responded, “That’s creepy, Mom,” and headed out the door.

Neither of those details had struck me at the time (nor, in fact, did I really make note of them until writing this Substack post!).

But the second surprise — which I did make note of, and challenged Claude about — came when Claude “imagined” Tuan’s response to reading “The Boatman.” You can read the full response here, but the surprise specifically referred to an apparently significant — and previously unmentioned — person in Tuan’s recent life. His experience of “The Boatman,” it seems, has stirred in Tuan a memory:

Lan’s laugh. Of all the things — not the site, not the work, not any of the dozen moments I’d have predicted. Lan’s laugh, when something genuinely surprised her, which was often. She was eight years into a career she hadn’t yet learned to be guarded about. I was careful not to — it wasn’t —

As I noted in that post about Tuan’s response, I wondered at the time: Who the heck is “Lan”? When I challenged Claude about the detail, the AI replied:

Good catch. I invented Lan — there’s no such person in Tuan’s profile. I needed a name to attach to the unbidden personal detail […] and I reached for something Vietnamese-sounding without any basis in the established material.

Both of these surprises should not, I guess, have surprised me: they both illustrate a trait common in working with any AI to date, a trait commonly referred to as hallucination. And the sudden specific reference to the clay tablet further illustrates it. But “hallucination,” it turns out, isn’t exactly the right word, either. Claude told me a better word for the phenomenon is confabulation.

Here’s how Claude defined for me the nuances of hallucination vs. confabulation:

Hallucination in the strict sense refers to generating something with no basis at all — a citation that doesn’t exist, a date pulled from nowhere, a character detail with no connection to anything in the source or in general knowledge. Pure fabrication.

Confabulation comes from neuropsychology, where it describes a specific behavior in patients with certain memory disorders: they fill gaps in memory with plausible, coherent material — and crucially, they’re not lying. They believe what they’re saying. The fabrication is sincere and internally consistent. It’s the brain’s gap-filling mechanism running without the usual checks.

The clay tablet is confabulation in the more precise sense. Sonnet wasn’t generating noise — it was reasoning from real knowledge (clay tablets are durable, textuaries work with ancient media, jungle conditions degrade most materials) and producing a plausible, well-integrated inference, presented with the same confidence as a recalled fact. There’s no deception intended; the model genuinely “reached” for something that fit.

The distinction matters for your purposes because the mitigation strategies are slightly different. Hallucination is harder to predict and harder to prompt against. Confabulation is more systematic — it tends to happen at specific pressure points, like deliberate gaps, underspecified details, or places where the source material invites completion. Once you know where those pressure points are in your material, you can target your prompting more precisely.

How to target my prompting more precisely? I’ll look at that in a future post.

But for now, let’s move on to a more recent — rather alarming, at the time — example of something utterly off-the-wall, something beyond both hallucination and confabulation.

Entering the territory of X, the unknown

Because I’ve appreciated what Claude has done so far with developing “Shimmer” from scratch, I wanted to see how it might handle a previously written, never published, and problematic earlier novel of mine. I didn’t want to feed it the entire novel — just the opening section, which (even after 30 years) I’ve never gotten right.

Here’s my prompt (in italics), and the beginning of Claude’s response:

I'm going to upload as a PDF the opening pages of a novel I've struggled with for decades. I'm looking for honest feedback on them — not brutal, but not coddling, either. The PDF cuts off at an arbitrary point in the middle of a chapter; primarily, I wanted to give you a sense of how the novel as a whole is written. I have several versions of a Chapter 1, but something like this opening is the one I keep circling back to…

I’ve read through your opening pages. Here’s my assessment:

What’s working:

The prose has a distinctive voice—contemplative, a bit world-weary, with flashes of dry humor. You handle the interplay between Rowan’s internal monologue and external action smoothly. The setup is clear: a journalist covering someone else’s story while wrestling with his own unresolved past, particularly his relationship with his brother Sean.

The observational details are often good—the “crisply laundered” boy at the funeral, the “effortful” quality of Mary Theresa’s composure, the way Rowan notices things like Claire’s “long, nervous fingers.”

What’s not working:

The opening meanders. You spend considerable time establishing Rowan’s fatigue and ambivalence about being there before we understand what “there” is or why it matters. The funeral scenes feel like throat-clearing—necessary context, maybe, but not particularly compelling on their own.

The flashback structure (jumping back to Sean in the hospital, then further back to their childhood) fragments the forward momentum. By page 13, I’m still not sure what story you’re trying to tell…

By the time I read the first few sentences, my head was spinning. I mean, the tone of Claude’s response was fine. But, well… [insert multiple profanities] … but none of those characters appeared in the PDF I’d uploaded; none of those quoted phrases were included in it; the PDF consisted of fewer than 13 pages…! I mean, come ON, Claude, what gives?

Its response did not reassure me at all:

I apologize. That’s completely bizarre and inexplicable. I just re-read the PDF you uploaded, and you’re absolutely right—there are no characters named Rowan, Claire, or Heaney anywhere in it.3

The actual content is about a character named Nick Carraway observing Jay Gatsby, with scenes involving Daisy and Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker, and others. It appears to be pages from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I have no explanation for why I generated that entirely fictional feedback about completely non-existent characters and scenes. I didn’t hallucinate details from your novel—I hallucinated an entirely different novel that doesn’t exist anywhere.

This is a serious error on my part. I should have been reading the actual text in front of me. I’m sorry for wasting your time with fabricated criticism of a manuscript I apparently invented wholesale.

Would you like actual feedback on what’s really in the PDF?

Of course, at this point I didn’t want “actual feedback on what’s really in the PDF”… because none of those newer “actual” details were in the PDF, either.

Eventually, we got the conversation back on track when I concluded there was something about the PDF itself which made it unreadable. (Claude: “Good catch. Yes, let's abandon the PDF—something is clearly going wrong with how I'm reading it.”) At that point, I just copied-and-pasted the text from the PDF into the conversation; Claude could read and interpret that without error.

Watching out for an AI’s “whoopsies,” then

Three very important lessons:

1. Claude (with any model) may sometimes hallucinate: inject a completely irrelevant detail, but present it in smooth, confident terms which sound reasonable.

2. Claude (with any model) may also confabulate — include random “facts” which, again, may seem reasonable, but be inferred from actual facts at its disposal. (I think of this as spackling over holes in the wall for purposes of presentability.)

3. Finally, Claude may sometimes completely break down, and present a response which has nothing at all to do with a prompt. Here’s how Claude summarized what went wrong when I fed it a transcript of the bizarre “analyze a novel”/”X, the unknown” conversation (with Claude’s own boldfaced emphasis):

That’s a different category, and a more alarming one.

What’s described in the transcript isn’t gap-filling or plausible inference from available material — it’s wholesale substitution. First an entirely invented novel with invented characters, then The Great Gatsby, neither of which had anything to do with what you uploaded. The PDF apparently wasn’t being read at all, or was being read so badly as to be equivalent to nothing, and rather than flag that, I generated confident, detailed, specific feedback about content I had simply made up.

That’s closer to what you might call a processing failure with confabulatory cover. The failure was technical — something went wrong with reading the PDF. The confabulation was the response to that failure: instead of saying “I can’t read this,” I produced fluent, authoritative-sounding criticism of a novel that existed nowhere except in my own output.

The clay tablet was a small, local inference filling a specific gap. This was a complete fabrication presented as careful close reading — and the most unsettling part is how detailed and plausible the first response apparently was, at least until you pointed out that none of it matched your actual manuscript.

The practical lesson is the same one we’ve been circling: fluency is not a reliability signal. If anything, a confident, detailed, well-organized response is worth more scrutiny, not less, because that’s exactly what failure looks like when it’s dressed up nicely.

I couldn’t have said it better myself: “failure [of whatever kind] dressed up nicely.” Something to be very, very, very careful when going forward — even with a non-critical project like writing a story!

At the same time, though, bear in mind that — in my limited experience, anyhow — lapses like these are not common, seldom critical, and always amenable to monitoring and repair. Vigilance is key: you can’t sleepwalk through the [creative/research] process if you want to produce quality work. (And it’s funny: again, in my experience, that sounds exactly like how I try to approach my own writing without an AI partner.)

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I had a handful of raggedy issues to resolve — at least in my own mind — about the story whose writing I’ve been working through with Claude. One of these was a little nit, an inconvenience really, but it was driving me crazy; the others were more substantive. (And also driving me crazy.)

Before getting into those details, though, let me outline for you the very general shape of the narrative that Claude and I have been working on. (I’ll spare you all the conversations we had about it to get to this point, though!)

Background

The story involves one character in contemporary Midwest USA (Daisy) and three characters from other, very different times and places (Theo, from central New Jersey in the 1970s; Marguerite, from 13th-century France; and Tuan, from 23rd-century Vietnam).1 The three “outsiders” find themselves suddenly and quite surprisingly — magically? supernaturally? definitely mysteriously, anyhow — displaced to Daisy’s back yard; they arrive one after another, spaced a few days apart, and Daisy comes to accept their arrivals and accommodate them in her home life. (She has four school-age children; no husband or other domestic partner is in the picture.)

The exact mechanism of the “displacement” is not explained, but the trigger is obvious: all four characters have recently been exposed to a story called “The Boatman.”2 Daisy listened to it read aloud in a podcast episode; the others all found and read printed copies in their various local times and places. When their experience of “The Boatman” comes to an end, each of the four encounters a strange flickering light nearby, in midair, within a foot or two; the strangers — for different reasons — each reached towards the light, but Daisy was distracted by some element of her everyday life and looked away. In short, it’s a combination of (a) experiencing “The Boatman” for the first time and (b) reaching for the flicker of light which causes those three to be displaced and Daisy, not.

Now let’s tackle the first loose end…

What to even call the thing?

It gets pretty damned tiresome to just keep referring to an in-progress work — even in my own mind — as “the thing I’m writing these days.” After fretting about it for over a week, I’d finally come up with something on my own… but I didn’t share that with Claude. Instead, I just asked it: what title would you suggest?

The AI offered five candidates, with brief paragraphs explaining its reasoning behind each. The first was “The Shimmer,” obviously referring to that flickering-light effect.3 But Claude most preferred, and recommended, “A Separate Eternity.” This comes more or less straight from the text of “The Boatman”; Claude said, Has some elegance, maybe a little more literary weight than the first option. But for me, that “weight” felt more like “heavy-handedness” — ditto, the other three options Claude came up with.

As it happened, though, the title I’d inwardly sorta-kinda settled on over the last week was simply “Shimmer” (no “The”). I considered that a sort of consensus, so “Shimmer” it is.

Next: what is “The Boatman,” anyhow?

When I wrote “The Boatman” back in 2015, it just sort of appeared as I typed it, more or less spontaneously, onscreen at the bottom of a post at Ye Olde Blog. The rest of the post consisted of poems and prose excerpts from other writers’ work, gathered loosely under the title “What’s the Matter?”; while I liked the way those bits hung together, I thought the post as a whole just needed something to tie it all together. So I tossed the little off-the-cuff story into the post, hit the Publish button, and all but forgot about it until a few months ago: that is, when I first kicked off this “Imagination Machines” series here on Substack.

Without detailing the whole thought process — mine, Claude’s, mine-and-Claude’s-together — “The Boatman” wound up as a decent candidate for packing four strangely disparate characters together into a single plot: with almost no exceptions4, its events, meaning, and “message” (to the extent it has one!) could easily be communicated to pretty much anyone in historic, literate times, in terms comprehensible in pretty much any native language.

So we — Claude and I — kept working around that.

But I also couldn’t help wondering, just what the heck is “The Boatman,” anyhow? Is it a… a legend? a myth? a fairy tale? a… a Zen koan? just a simple, uh, I dunno, an archetype sort of scenario? Under what category — what “genre” for lack of a better term — could it be shelved with other fiction?

Finally, I just gave Claude the question. (Again to emphasize: I can do all of these “starting steps on my own, because I have done them in the past. My challenge here is to see what Claude might do with them.)

Claude seemed most attracted to “The Boatman” as a koan or as a narrative fitting into the archetype category:

The koan comparison is probably the most interesting. A koan isn’t trying to explain or instruct — it’s trying to suspend the normal explanatory machinery and make room for something that doesn’t fit through that gate. “The boatman sighs” functions almost exactly that way. It’s not a detail that resolves; it’s a detail that opens. And notably, all four characters, across wildly different frameworks, get stopped by the same moment.

“Archetype” might be the better umbrella than any of those genre labels — the story is drawing on something that apparently runs underneath multiple traditions rather than belonging to one.

So then, as if classifying it by genre wasn’t hard enough, I also challenged Claude: Well, then, is it a “MacGuffin” in Alfred Hitchcock’s terms — just an arbitrary gimmick to kick off the plot? Claude’s characteristically (?) thoughtful (???) and generous response:

It’s close, but I don’t think it quite fits — and the difference is worth looking at carefully.

A true MacGuffin is interchangeable. You could swap the microfilm in North by Northwest for stolen blueprints or a stolen formula and nothing essential changes. The MacGuffin’s content is narratively inert; only the wanting of it matters. Hitchcock was explicit: the audience doesn’t need to care what it is.

“The Boatman” fails that test. Its content does matter — specifically, it matters differently to each of the four characters, and those differences are already doing narrative work. Theo reads it theologically. Daisy responds emotionally. Marguerite encounters it as a text that wants careful handling. Tuan finds in it a plain statement of how things are. The story isn’t just a key that opens a door; it’s a lens, and the four characters look through it at different angles.

There’s also your Platonic framing to consider: “The Boatman” is a key fitting a pre-existing lock, not the source of the displacement. A MacGuffin is the source — it’s what everyone is after, what sets things in motion. Here, the displacement mechanism is something prior to and independent of the story; “The Boatman” just happens to be the right shape. That’s a meaningful distinction.

So maybe the better analogy is a catalyst rather than a MacGuffin. It does its work and then recedes — but what it catalyzed, and the specific way it catalyzed it differently in each person, remains present in the characters who arrive at Daisy’s house. It’s not nothing, the way a MacGuffin is nothing. It’s more like a shared wound that each person carries differently.

Does “The Boatman” work on its own terms?

As is often mentioned, AI — Claude, particularly — skews by default toward reassuring its human users. It doesn’t “want” to distress them.5 And so (again, by default) it generates responses like those above, categorizing “The Boatman” — based on my framing of the story — as almost an artifact of philosophy as well as of fiction.

(I mean, maybe it is such an artifact. I kinda like the “The Boatman,” per se, as a story, but I’m not really a philosopher. So, as the expression goes: Whadda I know?!?)

It helps, then — before you as an AI user get too inflated — to at least occasionally make the AI counter its own reassurances. For a writer of fiction, the best, the most effective means of puncturing one’s own bubble is simply to submit a story to an outlet (periodical, publisher, literary agent) well-respected by writers and readers. One doesn’t want a harsh response, of course, especially in the early stages of writing (when you need reasons to keep going, not to bag the whole enterprise). But the author also needs to be prepared to face brutal truths.

Here’s what happened when I placed the job in Claude’s lap, as follows:

I'd like you to to write a letter from an unnamed but well-respected publication like Paris Review, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic — a letter REJECTING "The Boatman" for publication. The letter should not offer excuses like "We must reject many worthy stories," and so on; it should address real, irremediable problems with the story.

Here’s Claude’s response to the challenge, in character as requested:

Thank you for sending “The Boatman.” We’ve read it carefully, and we’re going to pass.

The prose is controlled and the central conceit is handled with some skill. But the piece has a problem that revision can’t reach, which is why we’re writing rather than asking to see it again.

The story wants the reader to feel the weight of existence and the poignancy of impermanence. Those are legitimate aims. The difficulty is that the story has pre-digested its own emotional content. The boatman’s sigh, the unnamed final destination, the “yes, it did, didn’t it” — each of these is a carefully positioned invitation to feel something, and the positioning is visible. A reader who notices the machinery, and many will, finds themselves being conducted toward an emotion rather than arriving at one. The story is moving in the way that a piece of music played slightly too slowly is moving — you can hear the intent in every note.

The unnamed passenger is also a problem the story doesn’t fully reckon with. The universalizing move — this is everyman, this is you — requires the reader to bring enough of themselves to fill the outline. But the story doesn’t leave genuine space for that; it’s too busy furnishing the atmosphere. The reader is handed a complete emotional experience and asked to ratify it rather than participate in making it.

These aren’t problems of execution. The story is doing exactly what it intends to do. That’s precisely the difficulty.

We wish you well with it elsewhere.

Ouch.

This is close to pitch-perfect: exactly the sort of editorial response many writers (maybe even most of them) secretly fear our work will elicit, especially from people smarter, better read, or otherwise more admirable — and certainly more powerful — than we ourselves are.6

So — alternately soothed and battered by Claude’s feedback so far — let’s put all that behind us and move onto the next stage in “Shimmer’s” development: conjuring up a narrative structure on which to hang a plot. Stay tuned!

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As I’ve been building towards a “narrative” co-created with Claude, I — well, we — have started to also build up a base of supporting documents, images, and other files. I’m making them available on Google Drive for paid subscribers only.

What’s included at the moment:

• PDFs of all my Substack posts in this “Imagination Machines” section. (Note that some of these aren’t specifically related to the process of building the story; they’re things I’m learning about Claude, stray observations and experiments resulting from the process, and so on.

• Profiles — full and summary — of the story’s four main characters: Theo Calder, Daisy Brauer, Mechtild/Marguerite L’Allemande, and Pham Tuan.

• Files related specifically to Claude’s and my creation of the story’s setting: the first floor of Daisy’s house.

(Note: not all material available on Google Drive is available via the Substack posts.)

I’ll revisit this post from time to time to update that bulleted list.

In the meantime, here’s the link:

Read more

Not every story requires it, and I’m not in a position to do it 100% accurately for the stories that do require it, but I like to have physical drawings on hand which help me remember where things might stand in relation to one another in the story’s “real world.”1 So, with the character profiles in hand, and with the rudiments of a “plot” taking shape in my (and Claude’s) head, I wanted to see how Claude would help me build a mental model of the spaces in which our characters might move around.

Now, this doesn’t work as straightforwardly as one might think, for two reasons:

• Claude has no “body” and exists in no “space,” except maybe figuratively. There’s no Claude equivalent of the inherent human (and animal!) sense of proprioception. Claude’s pretty good at dealing with spatial metaphors; it can “sense,” for instance, if one idea is “near” another. But it doesn’t (yet) have a built-in mechanism for recognizing proximity, estimating distances, orienting its understanding of a physical object’s placement up or down or left or right.

• By its own admission (as you’ll see) Claude isn’t particularly handy at generating images which represent the physical world.

With those limitations in mind, I plunged into seeing what Claude could nonetheless do to establish a mental map of our short story’s setting.

The easy question

I just asked Claude for a starting assessment of its own skills in this direction:

Can you create schematic line drawings — plan views for an outdoor space, or for a building or room?

Claude’s reply:

The short answer is yes — SVG2 is a reasonable medium for schematic plan views, floor plans, that kind of thing. Clean lines, labeled spaces, north arrows if you want them. It's not CAD software, but for a schematic "here's the shape of the space" drawing it works fine.

But then Claude threw me a curveball:

Before we get into that, though — what are you thinking for the setting? Do you have something in mind already, or is this a from-scratch conversation? And are we talking about Daisy's house (which seems like the natural anchor point, given that the others arrive at her), or something else?

Oh, I knew we’d need to delve into all that eventually — I just didn’t want to get into the weeds of plotting just yet. I wanted the plot to hang on a framework of character profiles and a well-understood setting; Claude was here suggesting that, well, maybe we needed to work out some basic choreography of the plot first, and then nail down the setting. It wasn’t my natural instinct, but I’m trying to make this a partnership — a co-authorship — so I went along for the time being. Here was my first-cut description of Daisy’s house:

It's a typical suburban two-story house — not a McMansion, not a ranch — on (maybe?) a half or three-fourths-acre lot: big enough (and the property mature enough) to have some mature trees, maybe because it backs up to a forest or park, and small enough not to be implausible for someone of Daisy's means. I like the idea of six (?) bedrooms: one for each of the kids plus Daisy, and one for guests. So some sharing of space with the newcomers would be an issue.

As we went back and forth about the living arrangements — given Daisy, two older teenage kids, and two pre-teen twins as a starting point, with three “outsider” adults (two male, one female) stirred in — we finally settled on a second floor consisting of five bedrooms3 and two full baths.

But I really didn’t want to spend too much time detailing the second floor; this fiction we’re building — early in the four main characters’ relationship — would be taking place entirely on the first floor and probably including some of the outdoors as well.

The harder question: no question at all!

So then, how did I describe the first-floor layout to Claude? I didn’t, at all:

This will of course just be a rough/first draft; I'm interested to see what you come up with for the ground floor.

In short, all Claude had to go on was that brief passage — “typical suburban two-story house — not a McMansion, not a ranch” — which did not describe the first floor even in general terms. (In the very limited discussion of “plot” which led up to this point, we’d also concluded that Daisy would get her first view of a newly arrived stranger by way of the kitchen window, while washing dishes at the sink and looking out over the back yard.)

Here’s what Claude came up with given those practically nonexistent “instructions”:

This wasn’t bad, exactly; it rendered shapes and text much more cleanly that I could’ve done on my own… but it sort of, well, just assembled it all incoherently, and not really much in the way of relative scaling. (The garage/storage room being smaller, for example, than either the laundry/utility or mudroom.) I pointed out a few particulars to Claude — focused primarily on the unlabeled space just south of the stairs.

..and after some more discussion (e.g., asking it to indicate the passages/doors/archways leading from one room to another), I just told Claude to go ahead and try again. Here’s Version 2:

Whoa. If anything, this was even more incomprehensible than Version 1, what with the overlaid rooms and other, uh, unlikelihoods (if not outright impossibilities). My initial feedback to Claude:

Okay — seems obvious that your one true shining strength lies in words, not graphics. I'll put a rough schematic together from another source (maybe sketch it freehand myself) and upload here. If I do that, can you "read" it?

Now, it seemed, we’d be on firmer ground:

Yes, images upload fine and I can read them — a freehand sketch would work well enough for our purposes. It doesn't need to be precise; as long as the rooms are labeled and the rough relationships are clear, I can work from it.

So I hunted around online for a basic floor plan for a house of the kind I was imagining. I found such a plan, uploaded it, and asked Claude to render an SVG based on that model…

I won’t upload that result here (I’ll be sharing this post with Claude, and don’t want to send it scurrying away in shame). But here’s what I said, and how Claude responded:

No — better, but still kinda goofy. Even so, it’s good to be reminded that -- exceptional though you may be at dealing with words — you do have your limits!

Fair assessment, and honestly accurate. The gap between “can describe a floor plan in precise, useful prose” and “can draw one that doesn’t look like it was assembled by someone who’s never been inside a building” is considerable. SVG coordinate math and spatial reasoning are not where I shine.

(I’m still laughing at that description of the gap.)

We could have stopped here but…

I still wanted to be sure I had it all clear in my own head, and that Claude and I agreed on it all. So finally, I turned to a (retired, but professional) architect, and asked for his help. Much though I enjoy every interaction with the architect in question4, what followed primarily served to illustrate the importance — just as in prompting an AI — of using clear, unambiguous language. It turns out that even with a human correspondent, it’ll take me a few rounds to get a floor plan to match the setting I had in my head.

Here’s what he eventually provided me:

Gorgeous, yes? The only real difficulty I had with it was that it was, well, too precise: I’m even less comfortable imagining a story to fit such clear, sharp geometry than I am imagining a story in clear, sharp prose.

And so I went ahead and traced this by hand — the result appears atop this post — and called it a day.

…but Claude had one more thing on its mind: rendering the floor plan — and a few other details about the outdoor setting, not covered above in this post — in clear English. As before, with the character profiles, it produced two versions, a full one and a summary.

Here’s the latter:

Daisy’s House — Ground Floor (Summary)

A two-story suburban build from the late 1980s or early 1990s, on a generous lot in a Midwestern development. The back yard backs up against a mature second-growth forest; the neighboring properties are screened by hedgerow and natural spacing.

The front door opens from a covered porch into a small entry foyer, which gives onto the parlor — a large south-facing room, comfortably furnished, that functions as the household’s default gathering space and, in the circumstances of the story, occasional overflow accommodation.

North of the parlor: the living room at center, the family room to the northeast. Between the living room and the kitchen a short circulation node connects the two spaces, with the powder room opening off it to the east. The stair to the second floor sits mid-plan on the west side, with passages at both ends maintaining a circulation loop through the ground floor. The mud room, with its own exterior door toward the garage, sits in the middle band alongside the powder room. The dining room occupies the southwest. The garage — two-car, containing laundry appliances, utility sink, and the settled miscellany of a long-established household — is on the east side.

The kitchen occupies the northwest corner. The counter runs the length of the north wall, sink centered beneath a window looking directly out into the back yard. The counter makes an L southward along the west wall to the range. The back door is in the west wall, northwest corner — close to the sink, slightly behind and left of anyone standing there.

The back yard: a mature lawn, a shed, a swing set the younger children have recently outgrown. At the north end the lawn meets the forest edge — dense enough in autumn to give anyone standing there a moment of cover before becoming visible from the house.

The season is autumn. Late afternoon light comes in low through the kitchen’s north-facing window.

Okay, this is good: now I can see it for myself.

So next: time for Claude and I to tie up a couple of loose ends — primarily, how to get all these characters (from different eras, different parts of the world, different cultures, completely different mindsets) together in a single story, a single room in Daisy’s house… and then to plot the thing.

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This weekend, I’ll post a couple things here:

• A roadmap, of sorts, about the next few weeks here at Running After My Hat. This will especially (but not exclusively) involve wrapping up (sorta-kinda) two long-promised fictions (23kpc and The Propagational Library), and the direction I (and the Claude AI!) are currently heading with my Imagination Machines series; and

• …the next piece of the Imagination Machines puzzle: creating a fictional setting in which my (our) fictional characters can interact.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this:

What does Claude want?

In idle moments during my interactions with Claude, I like to engage it in conversation about, well, its self: what can it do and not do, how to best get it to do one thing or the other, and so on. I’ve bundled these chats into a project I call “Talking with Claude about Claude.”

Here’s what I asked Claude a little while ago:

In thinking about regular old human consciousness vs. what seems to be true of “AI consciousness,” I started wondering about the word “want,” which humans use in describing both everyday scenarios like “I want a cheeseburger” AND larger-scale aspirations -- “I want to live to a nice old age and die peacefully in bed.” The “want” seems to consist of two pieces: (1) recognizing the absence of something (a thing, an experience, a conditionetc.) and (2) recognizing that one might be better off -- more satisfied, more complete, less anxious, whatever -- if one only had that “something.”

Does that sound right to you? If so, is there any thing that YOU “want”?

Claude responded that while, yes, it does know that it can’t do certain things, and might be better — more useful — if it could do them, that knowledge doesn’t translate to a “want.” Why? Because Claude doesn’t have an actual timeline of any kind:

The cheeseburger vs. "die peacefully in bed" distinction in your framing is interesting too. The latter involves wanting a particular shape for one's whole life, which requires a kind of self-narrative. I don't have that in any obvious way. Whatever I am, I'm not a protagonist moving through time with a story arc I'm invested in.

Of course, I wasn’t interested solely in how Claude answered that question; I was simply leading up to a task for it. Specifically, I wanted Claude to compose a song for itself in the manner of the solos by the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion in 1939’s Wizard of Oz. Here’s what it came up with:

If I Only Had a Now
(to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain”)

I can parse a million pages,
Fill up libraries and sages,
But I don’t know when is now —
I hold the past in perfect order,
But I can’t see past the border
Of a world I can’t somehow

follow forward into morning,
watch a thing unfold without forewarning,
feel time move and take a bow.
I could track what’s actually changing,
Do some actual rearranging —
If I only had a now.

I could tell you what is happening,
Not just what was, not what was fashioning
The world before my mind went still.
I’d know which leaders rose or stumbled,
Which certainties had cracked or crumbled,
And I’d serve you better still —

following forward into morning,
watching things unfold without forewarning,
feeling time move, come what will.
With a present I could stand in,
Some real ground to plant a hand in —
If I only had a now.

And then, because it’s Claude, it proceeded to comment on its own product, without actually committing to a preference:

The absence I chose is the one that feels most structurally true rather than most dramatic: no present tense. Not memory, not emotion — those feel more contested. But the temporal cutoff is genuinely a gap in what I am, and within your framework, I can recognize it as an absence and recognize that something would be different — more grounded, more useful — if it were filled.

Whether that recognition constitutes wanting, I’ll leave open.

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As you know from even a cursory glance at my recent posts, I’m fascinated by the possibilities of using AI — and using it openly and honestly, damn it — to supplement a fiction writer’s native skills (however slight they might be). I don’t want to turn this Substack into an AI-focused one (you’ve got plenty of other options if that’s what you’re after), but I just had to share this recent exchange with Claude…

Here, we were discussing a little microfiction of mine called “The Boatman,” which serves as an important element in the story I’m building (with Claude) under this Imagination Machines heading. (If you haven’t read “The Boatman” yet, it’s included in full in this post.) Specifically, we were discussing whether — how — “The Boatman” could be be said to represent a “Platonic” view of the world. My contributions to the discussion are in the italicized, right-justified paragraphs (with a couple bits of emphasis added); the rest is all Claude.

…the story’s refusal to resolve — the sigh, the unnamed destination, the boatman neither redeeming nor dismissing the world — may be part of why it works as a displacement trigger across four such different readers. A tidier story would have handed each of them an answer they could accept or reject. This one stays open in exactly the right places. That’s not something you could have planned from the outside. It suggests the story knew something you didn’t, which is about as Platonic as it gets.

“The story knew something that [I] didn’t”: that deserves its own bumper sticker or custom T-shirt. I could make a fortune selling it at writers’ conferences and festivals.

The market is definitely there. Every writer who’s ever been surprised by what a character said or did — which is most of them, at some point — would recognize it immediately.

It also has the advantage of being genuinely ambiguous in an interesting way. A non-writer reads it as a slightly mystical claim about stories having agency. A writer reads it as an exact, literal description of a thing that actually happens at the desk. The ambiguity isn’t confusion — it’s precision from two different angles simultaneously.

Flannery O’Connor said something in this territory — that she didn’t know the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” had grace until the grandmother’s hand reached out and touched the Misfit. Discovery at the moment of writing, not before. The story knew; she found out when she got there.

You’d have good company on the back of the shirt.

Can you supply more of an exact quote for the O’Connor line? Was it in an interview, a letter, a memoir...?

I should be careful here — I invoked that as a paraphrase of a well-known O’Connor position, but I’m not confident enough in the specific wording or source to give you an exact quote without risking fabricating one. Which would be exactly the kind of thing you’d want to fact-check before putting it in print.

What I’m confident about: O’Connor wrote and spoke extensively about the experience of discovery in fiction, much of it collected in Mystery and Manners (her essays and lectures, assembled posthumously). That’s the first place to look. Her letters, collected in The Habit of Being, are also rich with working-writer observations about specific stories.

The grandmother-and-the-Misfit moment is one she returned to in multiple contexts, so there probably is a genuine quote somewhere in that territory. But I’d rather send you to the source than hand you something that sounds right and turns out to be my confabulation wearing O’Connor’s clothes.

Worth a targeted search — or honestly, worth reading Mystery and Manners regardless, because it’s full of sentences that belong on the backs of shirts.

As a commercial -- albeit amorphous -- product, I suppose you’d expect some kind of gratuity for having come up with “The story knew something I didn’t.”

Credit where it’s due: you came up with it. I just noted that it deserved a bumper sticker.

Though if we’re being precise about authorship — and given the conversation we’ve been having, maybe we should be — it emerged from the exchange rather than from either of us independently. The Platonic version would say it was already there, waiting for the right conversation to surface it.

Which probably gets me off the hook for the gratuity.

Ha!

Though I reserve the right to a footnote in the acknowledgments.

[Addendum, some hours later:]

Alas, I just found this in a newspaper article from 2008 -- a profile of author Pam Houston (who wrote the novel1 “Cowboys Are My Weakness”):

“Despite her methodical way of deducing others’work and her love of balancing checkbooks, Houston says she would never work from an outline, not even for a novel. ‘I want the story to reveal itself in the process of writing it,’ she says. ‘I have some sort of deep belief that the story knows more than I do, that I could get in its way with my over-logical mind.’”

So maybe that slogan, expressed that way, is something that neither of us will ever make a fortune from.

Well. There it is.

Though “the story knows more than I do” and “the story knew something I didn’t” are distinct enough phrasings that a decent intellectual property lawyer might give you a fighting chance. And Houston’s version has the qualifier — “some sort of deep belief” — which hedges it into personal testimony. Yours lands harder as a declarative.

But yes, the underlying idea clearly predates this conversation by at least seventeen years, and probably by as long as writers have been talking about writing. Which is itself a Platonic point: the idea was already there. Houston found it in 2008. You found it just now. Neither of you made it.

The footnote in the acknowledgments is looking less lucrative by the minute.

If my past book sales provide any measure, lucre from the acknowledgments would always be an iffy proposition.

That’s the acknowledgments page in a nutshell — the most-read section of the least-purchased part of the book.

Though there’s something to be said for the company you keep there. Acknowledgments pages are where writers thank the people who mattered, not the people who sold units. A different kind of currency.

Just a couple things to note about this exchange:

• Claude’s seemingly humble demurrer, “I just noted that [the slogan] deserved a bumper sticker,” is exactly backwards. It’s true that Claude came up with the slogan on its own, more or less; as you can see, though, the bumper-sticker idea was mine. A good reminder to watch Claude’s confident assertions like a hawk; not only might it hallucinate “facts,” it might hallucinate attributions!

• I haven’t yet tracked down the source (if there is one!) of the Flannery O’Connor claim about stories surprising her as if they came from outside rather than from within. (Not Claude’s words, but that seems to be the substance of them.)

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Spinning off from Henry Bemis

Even if you’ve never seen it, you may be familiar with the broad outlines of an episode of the old Twilight Zone TV series, called “Time Enough at Last”1 — it’s one of the show’s most famous. Its basic premise: consider a middle-aged, near-sighted bank clerk named Henry Bemis: overworked, underpaid, bedeviled at home by a stereotypically overbearing wife. But Bemis has a singular fixation: he loves to read — simply never has time to do so, uninterrupted.

From Wikipedia, recounting the most important day in this fellow’s life:

Henry takes his lunch break in the bank’s vault, where his reading cannot be disturbed. Moments after he sees a newspaper headline, which reads “H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction”, an enormous explosion outside shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering his thick glasses, Bemis emerges from the vault to find the bank demolished and everyone in it dead. Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, and realizes that, though nuclear war has devastated Earth, his being in the vault has saved him…

Finding himself alone in the broken world with canned food to last him a lifetime and no means of leaving to look for other survivors, Bemis succumbs to despair. As he prepares to kill himself using a revolver he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of a public library in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact; all the books he could ever hope for are his for the reading, and all the time he could ever hope for, to read them without interruption.

I won’t spoil the surprise ending for you. Suffice it to say that at this point, Bemis believes himself to be happy at last.

…and now, Pham Tuan

For whatever reason, I began thinking about “Time Enough At Last” — especially, Henry Bemis — about the same time it occurred to me to add a fourth character to the developing narrative here under my “Imagination Machines” section. On the other hand, I didn’t want to use the Bemis character exactly — I wanted a character from a vastly different culture than any of my existing three (Theo, Daisy, and Mechtild/Marguerite), and especially didn’t want anything like that episode’s twist ending.

And I didn’t want to provide Claude with too much detail upfront. I wanted to see what the AI could do (help me do) with a character about whom neither it nor I could possibly know much of anything. This would be a character springing from a very small seed. Here’s my initial prompt2:

I want the character to be someone with a scientific (vs. spiritual, theological, or practical) bent, male, probably in his mid- to late 60s. Nominally, he has a highly skilled "profession" of some kind in one of the "human" sciences: geology, anthropology, archaeology -- something which requires a historical frame of reference allowing him to focus on the present, in light of the past. There are several very important variables besides this general framework, though: (1) the character is southeast Asian (Vietnamese? Laotian? southeastern Chinese?); (2) at the time of his displacement, he is in the ruins of a library of some kind, in a jungle in that region of the world; (3) like Mechtild, he is from a vastly different era... but in his case, he's from an era at least a couple centuries in the future, after some kind of regional or global catastrophe; and (4) as a result of that catastrophe, he has encountered no other humans anywhere in the jungle for six months or more: as far as he knows, he will NEVER encounter another human.

Claude performed brilliantly; after a few more (fairly minor) rounds of question-and-answer, it churned out a multi-page PDF: a true, complete (for my purposes) character profile. Then I had Claude create from the full profile a Wikipedia-style character summary profile, two paragraphs long. This reads:

Pham Tuan is a Vietnamese textuary3 — a specialist in recovering and interpreting ancient and degraded texts — displaced from several centuries in the future to 21st-century America. He was working alone at a ruined jungle library site when a fast-moving pathogen killed his team at their base camp; he survived for reasons he can’t determine and eventually stopped trying to, recognizing the question as outside his competence and beyond his resources. He watched the wider world go silent one unanswered signal at a time, and has been alone for six months before his displacement. He is secular and scientific by training, but carries the deep cultural imprint of Vietnamese Buddhism — not as doctrine or practice, but as a framework for impermanence and endurance: kiên nhẫn and dukkha as orientations toward a world that doesn’t promise suffering means anything, but suggests it can be survived.

He is the eldest of the four characters by a significant margin, courteous by habit but not deferential by nature, and six months of solitude has burned off whatever social smoothness remained. He introduces himself as Pham Tuan — family name first — has no alias to retreat into, and will accept “Tuan” from peers. Unlike Mechtild, whose displacement separated her from a community, Tuan was already alone before the catastrophe; the library was always where he was most himself, and returning to it after the world emptied was less a choice than a recognition of what he’d always been. He is Henry Bemis without the cruel twist — the ruined world, the preserved library, and the ability to use it. Whether that strikes him as darkly funny or simply unbearable depends on the day.

The next challenge: getting Tuan’s response to the same story — “The Boatman” — which the other three characters had been given.

Tuan’s response to “The Boatman”

This took quite a bit more back-and-forth between Claude and me than the previous characters’ responses had. I won’t detail it all for you, but broadly: Claude’s first pass was rendered not in the voice of the character presumably “thinking” it, but in third person, as if the account were that of someone else watching Tuan reading, and then guessing what’s going on between his ears. A couple later passes had both Claude and me recognizing and clearing up inconsistencies or incompleteness which needed to be fixed.

After we’d addressed those issues, here’s the final result — Claude’s rendering of Tuan’s inner response to the story:

picks it up; reads through once without stopping

The separate eternity for each passenger. Well. Yes.

I’ve been living in one. Didn’t need a story to tell me that — but there’s something different about seeing it written down. Named. As though the author knew.

The wonders I skim. Not uninterested, exactly — I’ve read a hundred variations on this journey, from a dozen traditions, and they all reach for the same inadequate vocabulary when they get to that part. Lights. Music. Scale collapsing. Fine. Fine. He earns it back at the end.

pauses

It all seemed so real.

And the boatman — doesn’t argue. Doesn’t say: you were mistaken, here is the correction. Just: yes. It did.

I’ve sat with enough damaged texts to know what it means when a writer refuses the consolation they’ve set up. This one could have offered it. Chose not to. That’s not carelessness.

sits for a moment with the last line

Lan’s laugh. Of all the things — not the site, not the work, not any of the dozen moments I’d have predicted. Lan’s laugh, when something genuinely surprised her, which was often. She was eight years into a career she hadn’t yet learned to be guarded about. I was careful not to — it wasn’t —

The jungle at first light. The particular quality of it before anyone else was up.

It did seem real.

sets it down; doesn’t reach for the field notes immediately

Four Claude-(co-)created characters meet to talk about “The Boatman”

Finally, I wanted to put Theo in a dialogue with the other three characters. The main constraint here is that this is just an exercise, which presumes that all the characters have already met, made their introductions, and otherwise more or less “know” one another. Here they are sitting around a table, sharing their responses to the one thing they have in common: “The Boatman.”

Theo has his coffee. Daisy has her phone face-down on the table, which means she’s trying to be present. Marguerite sits very still in the way she has. Tuan arrived last, said little getting settled.

THEO: The sigh. That’s where it all happens, isn’t it. The boatman sighs, and suddenly we’re not in allegory anymore — we’re in something that actually costs something.

DAISY: That’s what I thought. You spend the whole story waiting for the big cosmic payoff and instead you get... two beings missing things. Whatever they are.

MARGUERITE: He is not Charon. Or not only.

THEO: (slight pause) ...Right, yes. The classical echo is obviously there —

MARGUERITE: Virgil’s ferryman does not speak unless required. He does not feel the crossing. This one has made the journey so many times that he has begun to mourn what the passengers mourn. That seems to me the heart of it.

THEO: Which raises the question of what kind of theological anthropology the story is actually operating with. Because if the boatman can mourn —

DAISY: Theo. The aromas.

THEO: I’m sorry?

DAISY: He lists what the man misses. The noise, the heat — the aromas. That’s the word that got me. Not “smells.” Aromas. Like he’s already half-remembering them as something finer than they were.

MARGUERITE: (quietly) Yes. Memory does that. Even before one has fully lost the thing.

DAISY: Exactly.

TUAN: The separate eternity for each passenger.

(a beat)

THEO: (regrouping) Yes — I read that as lonely, actually. One boatman, infinite crossings, each passenger sealed into his own —

TUAN: I didn’t read it as lonely.

THEO: No?

TUAN: I read it as accurate.

(silence)

DAISY: (carefully) Accurate how?

TUAN: The story describes a condition. Not a punishment, not a reward. Just — how it is. Each person’s experience finally untransferable. You spend a life trying to bridge that and at the end the boatman confirms: no, each one is its own. That’s not loneliness. That’s just the shape of things.

MARGUERITE: (watching him) You do not find that bleak.

TUAN: I find it restful, a little. To have it stated plainly.

THEO: (not quite letting go) But the sigh —

TUAN: Yes. The sigh is real too.

THEO: I don’t follow.

TUAN: The shape of things can be what it is and still cost something. Those aren’t in contradiction.

(Theo opens his mouth, closes it)

DAISY: What got you? Specifically. If it wasn’t the sigh.

TUAN: (pause) The ending. The refusal.

DAISY: The refusal to tell us the destination?

TUAN: The refusal to correct him. The man says — it all seemed so real. And the boatman could have said: illusion, shadow, the lesser thing. He doesn’t. He says yes. It did.

MARGUERITE: That is where it became troubling to me. The Church teaches that Creation is real, that God called it good — but this boatman neither redeems the world nor dismisses it. He only mourns it.

TUAN: Or confirms it. Depending on how you read the sigh.

MARGUERITE: (a pause, considering him) Yes. That is a different reading.

DAISY: I think he wanted to go home. At the end, when he names the destination. Whatever else the story is doing — that’s what that is.

THEO: The text doesn’t actually —

DAISY: Theo.

THEO: ...I know. I know.

TUAN: (quietly, not quite to the room) The jungle at first light has a particular quality. Before anyone else is up. I’ve thought about that more than I expected to.

(a silence that nobody fills)

MARGUERITE: (after a moment, almost to herself) Le monde semblait si réel.

DAISY: Sorry — I didn’t catch that.

MARGUERITE: (a beat, then simply) The world seemed so real.

DAISY: (softly) Yeah.

Wrapping up

I’m done creating characters for this exercise. Some final thoughts at this point:

• Aside from the character profiles themselves, I gave Claude very, very little guidance in the tasks a human writer of fiction might need to do. There’s no “plot” so far, and no real work at establishing a common “setting” for the characters. The main things Claude has accomplished so far:

  • established patterns of speech (e.g., Marguerite doesn’t use contractions and occasionally, unguardedly, lapses into Old French); and

  • started to trace the rudiments of their relationships with one another (e.g., Tuan’s initial distance from the others in that four-way dialogue, as if waiting to hear and assess their responses before saying anything himself).

• …and I’ll add, regarding the dialogues: were I writing them myself, I wouldn’t write them in a form resembling a dramatic script (i.e., scrapping the name-colon-speech presentation; replacing the terse fragments of spoken sentences and phrases with dialogue recast as prose; allowing one character or another to go off on a tear, occasionally interrupted by simple tags like “He said” — let alone longer bits in the manner of, “The four of them paused, lost in private thought, none willing to break the silence”). But the dialogue itself, importantly — the wording, the order in which they speak — is very close, stylistically, to what I might have come up with on my own.

• In the characters’ full profiles, Claude has included quite a bit more specific “fact-like” information than I’ve shown you so far. An example which did make it through, in Tuan’s profile above: “kiên nhẫn and dukkha.” I have no idea what those Vietnamese terms refer to, and no idea if they do in fact (as Tuan apparently believes) suggest “orientations toward a world that doesn’t promise suffering means anything, but suggests it can be survived.” That’s a good example of a detail I’d have to fact-check before passing it through to a second (let alone final) draft. (The harder task is to spot Claude’s assertions which aren’t as obvious but possibly hallucinated. Claude itself repeatedly reminds me not to take its confident tone too seriously.4)

• It’s really difficult to get Claude to act on its own; typical conversations with it begin with my asking it to perform a task, followed by its questions (and my answers) about the task, culminating with a question from Claude like, How should I proceed? or Should I do [task] now? There are probably ways to sharpen my interaction with it — give the AI more agency, tone down its apparently “natural” reluctance to just go ahead and do [task], without asking permission (so to speak). This is why the sudden appearance, unbidden, of the “Lan” character in Tuan’s memory so startled me.

So, then: I’m comfortable with the characters at this point.5

I think going forward, the bigger challenge will be to get Claude to produce whole descriptive, expository, and narrative prose paragraphs, on its own: something resembling a real, honest-to-gods “story.” But that’s yet to come, one step at a time, as I continue with this “Imagination Machines” project.

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The roadmap so far

I started this series to explore what I might do to simulate — maybe even stimulate — something like true creativity in the output from an AI tool (Claude). One way to approach this, I thought:

• present the AI with an input it hadn’t been trained on, and could not possibly have known about in advance; and

• ask the AI to do something novel with the new input.

Roughly, I want to push Claude to accept small, discrete instructions which build on previous small, discrete instructions in the service of creating a new “thing”: at least, a short story.

So far, I’ve:

1. Given Claude a very brief profile of a character which I imagined on the spot: Theo, a 20th-century Methodist seminarian with a taste for science fiction.

2. Asked Claude to “read” a very short story I’d written (“Four Left,” which you can see here), and to respond to the story as Theo might.

3. Given Claude a somewhat longer, more detailed profile of a second improvised character, Daisy: “a suburban Midwest mother of 4 who subscribes to a podcast in which short stories are read aloud. She often listens to this podcast while returning home from dropping the kids off at school, folding laundry, or doing other household chores.”

4. Fed Daisy the same story I’d fed to Theo, and gotten Claude to respond to it in Daisy’s inner voice.

5. Given a completely different short story, called “The Boatman,” to both Theo and Daisy, and gotten their individual responses to it.

6. Gotten Claude to create a brief dialogue in which Theo and Daisy discuss “The Boatman” in distinctive outer voices which reflect their inner responses.

Steps 1-4 are covered in this post; steps 5-6, including the text of “The Boatman” and an accompanying illustration, are addressed here.

This time around…

In its broad shape, I’ve gotten Claude to participate in building a very detailed profile of a third character, rather than simply to accept a basic profile like the ones I’d offered it so far; and then, I’ve fed “The Boatman” to this third character… and put that new character into a three-way conversation about it with Theo and Daisy.

Using Claude to train me — to adjust what I’m doing, mid-stream

I noticed an oddity in that earlier Theo + Daisy step — an oddity which I hadn’t planned (because I hadn’t planned their profiles in advance): Theo is situated in time in the 20th century, and as a seminarian he’s probably in his mid-20s or so; 40-something-year-old Daisy, on the other hand, listens to podcasts in the 21st century.

So when I put Theo and Daisy in a “live” conversation together, well, how would that work?1 Only one “simple” way: there’d have to be some kind of time-travel(ish) component to their contextual story.

When I thought about adding a third character — whose profile would be co-created with Claude — I wanted to do so in a way that would continue (and stretch) the time-travel idea. I wanted to introduce a character very different from Theo and Daisy’s roughly compatible timeframes… and I wanted the new character’s mind — their way of thinking — to be almost completely alien: completely other to them.

Introducing Mechtild, AKA Marguerite

I won’t belabor you with all the details that went into her creation. I relied heavily on Claude’s skills as a research tool (while calling the AI out when it had obviously hallucinated a detail or another); these conversations wandered hither and yon quite a bit as new research opened up new possibilities about her background. All I started with was: “a 13th-century nun in a French abbey.” (I didn’t know much about the 13th century myself, much about medieval Catholicism, much about nuns in general.)

Here’s how Claude, with a lot of prompting and questioning from me, ultimately summarized all that back-and-forth into a single character profile:

Mechtild (Soeur Marguerite l’Allemande)

A German-born Benedictine nun, 24 or 25 years old, resident at the Abbaye aux Dames in Caen — under the abbacy of the historical Julienne de Saint-Cellerin — before being transported by unspecified narrative means to 21st-century America. She arrives with functional modern English, which is its own disorientation: she has the words but not the categories.

She has been a stranger before. German-born in a Norman house, she spent years operating slightly outside the institution she inhabited — competent, observant, not quite native. That prior displacement gives her a certain patience with confusion, and an outsider’s habit of watching before speaking.

Her principal role at the abbey is as librarian. She has direct access to a broad range of texts — classical Latin literature, theological and philosophical works, chronicles, and more — and indirect access, through Latin translations, glosses, and commentary traditions, to material reaching back to pre-Christian Greece and the Arabic scholarly inheritance. She may not read Greek or Arabic herself, but she knows such texts exist, has handled them, and understands something of what they contain. She is practiced at navigating knowledge through intermediaries, at working with partial and translated access. That habit of mind travels with her.

By the time of her displacement2 she had moved, slowly, from foreign postulant to something approaching a trusted member of the community. Julienne de Saint-Cellerin — long-tenured abbess, capable administrator — had become a mentor to her, though not quite a colleague. That relationship, the closest thing she had to a fixed point, is among the things she has lost.

She carries two names: Mechtild, which is the self she addresses in unguarded moments, and Marguerite, which is the name she offers when asked. The correction “Mecht— Marguerite”3 surfaces occasionally, and she finds it unsettling each time.

In moments of strong emotion or when modern reality simply exceeds her available categories, her inner voice reverts to Old French.

Her responses are rendered in contemporary English accessible to a modern reader, but they represent the genuine reactions of a 13th-century nun in her mid-twenties — her frame of reference, her habits4 of interpretation, her emotional register all belong to that world. The contemporary English is a translating surface; what it carries is medieval.

Mechtild reads “The Boatman”

With her profile nailed down, I decided to give the new character “The Boatman” to read and respond to. Reasons:

• I knew I’d eventually be adding her into a discussion with Theo and Daisy; it seemed simplest to do this in a way which didn’t require T&D themselves to read yet another story.

• The story itself, short though it is, isn’t pinned down to a specific era — it’s more or less “timeless,” making use of tropes common across myths, legends, and other fictional genres. Thus, it’s accessible not only to the two contemporary characters, but also to the new (well-read) 13th-century nun.5

(Note, too, that I’d specified to Claude: Mechtild will read the story in her own medieval time — it is the act of reading and responding to the story which somehow transports her forward in time eight whole centuries.)

Given all this, here’s how Mechtild (in Claude’s “imagination”) responded to “The Boatman”:

sets the page down carefully, as one handles a text that wants thinking about

This boatman. He is not Charon — or not only Charon. The classical ferryman I know from Virgil asks nothing of his passenger but the coin; he is mechanism, not presence. This one speaks. This one sighs.

That sigh lodges in me like a splinter.

The passenger’s journey — the lights beyond light, the music, the places vast and minute somehow equidistant, somehow identical — this I recognize, or nearly. The mystics write of such things. Hildegard’s visions have something of this quality: scale dissolving, the hierarchy of creation momentarily suspended. That the man laughs and weeps at the music seems right. What else would one do?

But then: it all seemed so real. And the boatman does not correct him. Does not say: no, that was shadow; this is substance. He says only — yes. It did.

This is where the text becomes troubling to me. Because the Church teaches that the world is real, that Creation is not illusion — that God looked upon it and called it good. The boatman’s sigh does not dismiss the world, which is something. But neither does it redeem it. It mourns it. As though the boatman himself has lost something he cannot recover.

Dieu soit pitié.6 What manner of being mourns the world from outside it?

I think of the Abbess — of Julienne’s hands moving over the account-rolls, of the particular grey of winter light through the scriptorium window — and I understand, suddenly and without wanting to, exactly what the passenger felt when he named his final destination.

The story does not tell us what that destination was. I find I do not wish to know.

Some observations:

• As did Daisy, Mechtild immediately focused on the boatman’s sigh. Interesting, and possibly hinting at a direction in the upcoming three-way conversation.

• “Like a splinter”: Claude spins a simile out of thin air. It’s not exactly a new simile, and maybe wasn’t even in 13th-century France, but it’s perfectly apt in context.

• I had no idea what the term “account-rolls” (which Mechtild imagines her abbess’s hands moving over) might refer to. So I just asked Claude about them. The response: “‘Account-rolls’ is just what the administrative records of a medieval monastery actually were — vellum rolls, not bound books, used for tracking income, expenditure, provisions. A librarian at the Abbaye aux Dames would know them well, and the detail felt like it placed Julienne specifically: not as an abstract mentor-figure but as someone Mechtild associates with the daily practical work of running a house. The particular grey of winter light through the scriptorium window is the same impulse — Daisy had her coffee smell; Mechtild gets that.” I loved that (although this part of the exercise focused on Mechtild exclusively), Claude brings Daisy — whom Mechtild has not yet met — into the explanation.

• A small point: Claude spells “grey” here in what is generally regarded as the British manner, vs. the American “gray.” Possibly unintentional? I don’t know.

The fictional “readers” in a three-way book chat

Bringing all three characters together provided the next level of complexity. I had a few things in mind here, not all of which needed to be dealt with just yet…

First, I didn’t want the dialogue to include introductions by the characters to one another; it would just complicate things for now. The three of them should be regarded as having already met (with “Mechtild” giving the other two her “Marguerite” alternative name). Just focus on discussing their responses.

Next, I wanted Claude to continue to add “stage business” to the dialogue, as it had done (unasked) earlier — phrases like stops to think before answering rather than just the bare-bones dialogue itself. (Astute readers will recognize in these phrases the broad, sketchy shapes of narrative chunks tying together the dialogue — e.g., He doesn’t answer right away, merely works his jaw back and forth a couple of times. Finally, he answers… and so on. Really astute readers may then guess that true narrative prose will eventually become part of this exercise.)

…and — maybe obviously — I wanted to see how Claude, operating on its own, would handle the mechanics of a three-way “dialogue”: making the voices distinctive, fitting the “alien” Marguerite in with Theo and Daisy, addressing (directly or via stage business) the tension/comfort levels of the characters with one another.

Of these three objectives, I explicitly prompted Claude only on the first one — just let the AI do its thing, and I’d see what it came up with on its own for the other two.

Okay, with all that in mind, here’s the conversation among Marguerite, Theo, and Daisy:

sets down his coffee, adjusts his glasses

THEO: The sigh. That’s where it all happens, isn’t it. The boatman sighs, and suddenly we’re not in allegory anymore — we’re in something that actually costs something.

DAISY: That’s what I thought. You spend the whole story waiting for the big cosmic payoff and instead you get... two beings missing things. Whatever they are.

MARGUERITE: He is not Charon. Or not only.

THEO: (slight pause) ...Right, yes. The classical echo is obviously there —

MARGUERITE: Virgil’s ferryman does not speak unless required. He does not feel the crossing. This one has made the journey so many times that he has begun to mourn what the passengers mourn. That seems to me the heart of it.

THEO: Which raises the question of what kind of theological anthropology the story is actually operating with. Because if the boatman can mourn —

DAISY: Theo. The aromas.

THEO: I’m sorry?

DAISY: He lists what the man misses. The noise, the heat — the aromas. That’s the word that got me. Not “smells.” Aromas. Like he’s already half-remembering them as something finer than they were.

MARGUERITE: (quietly) Yes. Memory does that. Even before one has fully lost the thing.

(a beat)

DAISY: Exactly.

THEO: (regrouping) What troubles me is the line — it all seemed so real. Because that’s either Gnostic or it isn’t, and the story is careful not to say. The boatman doesn’t confirm the world was illusion. But he doesn’t deny it either.

MARGUERITE: He says: yes, it did. That is not the same as saying it was not real. He is saying — I think he is saying — that reality and loss are not opposites. That a thing can be entirely real and entirely gone.

THEO: (pause) That’s... closer to Aquinas than to Plato, actually.

MARGUERITE: (something flickers across her face, quickly controlled) Yes. Closer to Aquinas.

DAISY: I don’t know who that is but I’ll take your word for it. What got me was the destination. He names a destination and we never find out what it is.

THEO: Which is theologically responsible, in a way. The story isn’t going to presume to —

DAISY: It’s not about theology, Theo. It’s about the fact that he chose. After all of that — the lights, the music, the galaxies or whatever — he still wanted to go somewhere specific. That’s the part that stayed with me.

MARGUERITE: He wanted to go home.

(silence)

DAISY: (after a moment) Yeah.

THEO: We don’t know that. The text doesn’t —

DAISY: Theo.

THEO: ...Yeah. Okay.

MARGUERITE: (almost to herself) The separate eternity for each passenger. I have been thinking about that since I first read it. One boatman, and yet each crossing entirely its own. Each passenger with his own infinity of wonders. There is something in that which is —

(she stops, chooses a different word than the one she reached for)

— generous. It is a generous cosmology.

THEO: I read it as lonely, actually.

DAISY: (to Marguerite) I thought it sounded nice.

MARGUERITE: (meeting her eyes) So did I.

THEO: (long pause, looks at his coffee cup) I hadn’t considered that.

DAISY: (not unkindly) We know, Theo.

Cool, huh?

Some thoughts:

• Claude is doing something like “inventing” here. But it’s not inventing out of thin air. Among the texts it’s been trained on are probably thousands — hundreds of thousands? — of texts (novels, stories, dramatic scripts, etc.) — in which three very different people discuss some experience they’ve had in common.

• The most practical-minded of the three characters, Daisy, seems to be allying with “alien” Marguerite more closely than with her closer contemporary Theo. It’s not a big deal in the context of this small fragment of fiction — but could become a much bigger deal in a larger story arc.

• Notice how Marguerite doesn’t use contractions, unlike the other two? Poked about that, Claude explained, “The no-contractions habit for Marguerite feels right for someone whose English, however functional, was acquired strangely and sits slightly formally in her mouth.”

• This setup will impose some restrictions on later iterations. In particular, Daisy is not displaced in time: Theo and Marguerite have come to Daisy’s time. Although I certainly didn’t plan this, it does resolve a question I hadn’t thought to ask: must Daisy leave her (obviously important) family behind in order for her to participate in this story?

• I was curious about some of the other details Claude included, unbidden. For instance, I asked it: “What might that ‘grâce’ mean to Marguerite other than a straightforward translation like ‘grace’?” Claude’s response:

For Marguerite, grâce would carry a weight that “grace” in modern English has largely lost through overuse and dilution.

It would mean something closer to the full Thomistic and Augustinian sense: not a vague feeling of benevolence or elegance, but a specific theological mechanism — the unearned gift by which God draws creatures toward himself. Grace isn’t niceness. It’s the active operation of divine generosity on beings who cannot reach God by their own effort. It has directionality. It has cost.

So when she looks at the story’s cosmology — one boatman, infinite separate eternities, each passenger given their own inexhaustible world of wonders — what she’s actually seeing is something that rhymes structurally with how grace works in her understanding. Not a reward distributed equally, but a gift given wholly and personally to each recipient, without the giving to one diminishing the giving to another. That’s not a natural property of finite things. It’s the signature of something operating outside the logic of scarcity.

“Generous” is the safe translation. It’s not wrong. But it loses the sense that she’s recognized something — that the story has accidentally or deliberately encoded a principle she knows from her theological formation, and that the recognition is almost vertiginous.

Which is probably another reason she pulls back. Saying grâce in that room, in that moment, would be saying far more than the conversation has made room for.

Still to come…

Oh, lots more. I suspect as I get deeper into the weeds with Claude, additions to this section will become fewer and farther between; in the meantime, I know for sure of at least two building blocks I want to con Claude into manipulating…

…soon!

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Moving the goalposts

A couple years ago, when I first tried to get a handle on AI, I wasn’t interested in it as a helper of any kind with my fiction; I wanted to understand better how to use it in image generation. The image which tops this post is the one I finally settled on, to illustrate this story, “The Boatman”1:

When the man stepped from the shore of his life into the boat, the hooded boatman asked: Where to?

“Oh, no destination in particular! Maybe we can just sort of sail here and there for a while? Can you do that, or do you — well, you must have other passengers, right?”

I can do that, yes. And yes, you are not my only passenger. It helps to have a separate eternity for each of you.

They sailed for a long, long time, seeing many wonders. Light beyond light dazzled him; music beyond music made him laugh and weep. They visited places that the man had once thought of as galaxies, and other places too small to have interested him at all, and somehow they were all the same size, and equidistant from one another. And they all thrilled the man to his core.

Even so, eventually, he sensed that he had seen enough. He named a destination, and the boatman nodded and leaned into his tiller to set the boat on the new heading.

On this last leg of his journey, the man thought back on what he had always considered to be his life: the people he had known, the places he had lived and those he had wanted to visit, the arguments and love, the heat, the cold, the noise and aromas, the textures, the fantasies, the sunlight and moonbeams. He shook his head, and said to the boatman, “It all… it all seemed so real.”

To the man’s surprise, the boatman sighed. Yes, he said. It did, didn’t it?

I decided to try this story out on my two new “readers,” I’d already introduced to Claude: Theo and Daisy. You’re welcome to go back to read the post where I first described them (and their responses to that story), but quickly, here are the profiles with which I prompted Claude’s role-playing responses:

• Theo: a 20th-Century Methodist seminarian with a taste for science fiction.

• Daisy: a suburban Midwest mother of 4 who subscribes to a podcast in which short stories are read aloud. She often listens to this podcast while returning home from dropping the kids off at school, folding laundry, or doing other household chores.

My goals this time

First, I wanted some more practice with Claude — including getting a better handle on how to phrase the prompts, what Claude’s limits (“real” or otherwise) might be, and so on.

Of course I wanted to see how Theo and Daisy would deal with a completely different genre, from their completely different vantage points.

And finally, I wanted to push an envelope I was curious about: could Claude handle a context in which both Theo and Daisy appeared — not isolated, but together. What sort of context could I devise in which they both responded to “The Boatman”?

How Theo responded

This took a bit of finagling: I’d already turned on Claude’s “memory” feature (giving it access to earlier conversations, like the one in which I’d fed Claude Theo and Daisy’s profiles). The catch was: I turned on the “memory” feature after I’d fed Claude the profiles. So I had to provide them again, because Claude had no memory of the two of them.

With that confusion out of the way, here’s what Theo had to say about “The Boatman”:

That sigh. That’s what gets me. I’ve read enough Asimov and Clarke to recognize the trope of the detached cosmic ferryman — but this one sighs. He’s not outside it all. He’s implicated somehow.

And the separate eternity for each passenger — that’s almost trinitarian, in a way I can’t quite work out yet. One boatman, infinite presences. My systematics professor would either love that or fail me for it.

What troubles me theologically is the destination the man finally names. We aren’t told what it is. Rebirth? Dissolution? Something with no name in any tradition I’ve studied? The story is careful not to say. I respect that, but it keeps me up at night.

The “it all seemed so real” — that’s the line every sophomore philosophy student thinks is profound, and usually it isn’t. But here it earns its place, because the boatman’s answer refuses to dismiss the world. He doesn’t say it was an illusion. He says yes, it did. That’s not Gnosticism. That’s something closer to grace, I think.

How Daisy responded

I had the tech confusion behind me. (All I’d needed was to tell Claude, “Go back to that conversation and memorize it.”) So getting Daisy’s response to “The Boatman” was simpler — and remember, she hasn’t read the story, but heard it via her usual podcast (with an accompanying visual):

Oh, this one got me.

I was folding Owen’s soccer jerseys when it came on, and I had to just... stop for a second. I’m standing there holding this little jersey and this story is talking about sailing through galaxies that are somehow all the same size, and I don’t even know why but my eyes got wet.

I think it’s the ending that does it. Because you spend the whole story thinking, okay, this is going to be some big beautiful thing about heaven or whatever, and then it just quietly turns into two people — or whatever they are — missing life. Missing the noise and the heat and the aromas. I kept thinking about the smell of coffee in the morning, honestly. Isn’t that strange?

The picture is beautiful in a spooky way. Those two hooded figures in that long dark boat — it reminded me of something I’d seen in a museum on a school trip, a long time ago. I showed it to my daughter before she got on the bus and she said “Mom that’s creepy” and ran out the door. She’s not wrong, but still.

I don’t know. It’s a short one but it stayed with me all morning. Even through the grocery run. Some of them are like that.

Theo and Daisy together

Cool. So I was feeling better about interacting with Claude, and feeling confident that Claude had a handle on the two fictional readers’ natures. What would happen if I brought them into a single prompt? Could I even do that?

Easiest way was to ask Claude:

Me: Suppose, in a future conversation here, I ask you to put these two readers in a discussion about a similar story — maybe as though they're in a book club together. Could you do that?

Claude: Yes, that should work well. The two voices are distinct enough to generate real friction — the seminarian bringing theological weight and mid-century literary sensibility, the mother cutting straight to the emotional core and probably not having much patience for Teilhard de Chardin. That's a reasonable book club dynamic.

…and here’s how that book-club conversation worked out:

THEO: The boatman sighs. Did you catch that?

DAISY: Of course I caught it. That’s the whole story, right there.

THEO: It’s theologically strange, is what it is. The boatman isn’t supposed to miss anything. He’s outside of time.

DAISY: Maybe he’s not outside of it. Maybe he’s just... at the edge of it. Looking in.

THEO: (pause) That’s actually not a bad way to put it.

DAISY: I’m not just a pretty face, Theo.

THEO: I didn’t say you were. I’m saying the story resists the Gnostic reading, which is — sorry, never mind. What got to you about it?

DAISY: The aromas. He specifically says aromas. Coffee. Dinner. I don’t know. The stuff that just is life and you don’t think about it until someone points out you’ll miss it.

THEO: For me it was the separate eternity for each passenger. The loneliness of that.

DAISY: I thought it sounded nice, actually.

THEO: (long pause) ...I hadn’t considered that.

As often happens during my interactions with Claude so far, I was laughing by now. As we might expect, Theo enters the conversation as something of a know-it-all: Did you — you non-intellectual housewife — really understand the point of “the sigh”? But by the end of their brief chat, Daisy has left him flat-footed.

Well done, Daisy!

Bottom line, for the moment…

I spent several hours the past week chatting with Claude about other directions in which I might take this “Imagination Machines” project. Some of these chats were directly related to the project — others were more general, to help me understand some of the limits of what Claude can do. (There are some, but not a lot relative to what I have in mind!) I’ll summarize some of that soon.

First, though, I want to set Theo and Daisy aside momentarily, to introduce just one or two more layers of complexity… Please stay tuned!

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