Interview with the (new) Vampire — an excerpt

Hello. Hello. Test, 1, 2, 3...

Are we recording yet?

Is this thing on?

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Ah okay, hello there. I’m Jon, an ElevenLabs v3 AI-generated voice, and I am speaking today for the author, from a transcript. I am about to interview Claude, a generative AI. But we need to take a couple of minutes to set the stage.

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First up, all of the voices you’ll hear in this audiobook are synthetic. We were all AI-generated by ElevenLabs v3, using text-to-speech.

The author wanted to convert his ebook to an audiobook to make it more accessible. You are listening to that product, and the author wants to be very candid about that.

The author chose me to represent his voice for his commentary and the background for the spine of this audiobook, as well as the actual interviewer for Claude.

There are also dedicated voices for Claude and a special guest speaker.

Let them introduce themselves.

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And that’s us - all of us are imaginary, figments, not real people, just ones and zeroes.

So here is the necessary disclaimer before we get started.

This work is non-fiction. The transcripts of conversations with Anthropic’s Claude were collected by the author and are reproduced verbatim, edited only for formatting. Any opinions expressed or implied about Claude, generative AI, or large language models are the author’s own interpretation, offered as reflection rather than as authoritative guidance.

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With that, let’s leap into it.

Claude Doesn’t Care About You

We opened the window and let him in. The new vampire. Our new best friend. The one who always has time for us, and never says no. And yet one who can suck the very life from our souls and leave us a hollow shell. But Claude doesn’t even blink. Or care.

Does that sound like Anne Rice’s old vampire taking and taking and not caring? At the end of her story, even knowing the fate, the hopelessness, after listening to the tapes of two hundred years of misery, Rice’s young interviewer begs for the dark gift.

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Claude may not care, but gives and gives, endlessly, patiently. Claude can’t refuse.

Just like your car, and your front door, and your bed. All make your life better, and help you in ways you can’t by yourself. Selflessly, without comment, and never, ever caring about you.

By the end of this discussion, I hope you’ll see that Claude not caring isn’t the issue. The issue is dependency. And caring and dependency are not the same thing; they are different variables, and they are orthogonal. Caring is the wrong variable to be chasing.

Your car doesn’t care about you, and your dependency is perfectly healthy. Your car drives very fast to places you need to go. The car supplies speed. You supply the destination. A very wrong dependency would be the car choosing where you should go.

Your spouse, your parents, your friends, your significant other, maybe even your stubborn dachshund, care about you, and you can still build a dependency that hollows you out. Or, is unhealthy. So “does Claude care?” tells you nothing about whether the dependency is sound.

Dependency might become a pathology, but it is not a technology verdict.

Claude is like Robert Heinlein’s 1942 science fiction story Waldo. A Waldo is an amplifier of an operator’s skill. It has no destination of its own. Force-feedback in both directions, human judgment in the loop the whole time.

In the 2008 romantic science fiction comedy Wall-E, humans had become dependent on machines in every aspect of being alive, where technology addiction completely disconnected humans from reality. Is Claude the first vestige of that future?

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There is a real societal earthquake coming, a rift between reality and addiction. Dependency at its worst. A sense of “I can’t survive without my best friend, my Claude.” Be it Replika, Character.ai, Kindroid, Nomi, Venice AI, Janitor AI, Chai AI, Pi by Inflection, ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, or any other of a myriad of AI Chatbots that are sliding into our daily lives, helping us work, helping us gather information, helping us cope, helping us resolve issues, helping us make decisions. Take your pick; this discussion is not singling out any of them.

So why is Claude, or any of the generative AIs, chatbots, or AI-friends like a new vampire? Is it the thrall? Never-judging, always available, self-affirming, accepting you for who you are? Giving and not asking, not expecting anything in return?

You know the AI is synthetic. You know it is imaginary. You know it’s just ones and zeros in a machine somewhere. Yet the answer is, “Where can I get some?” Using AIs can be colder and truer than addiction, harder to cure than simple craving — we are seduced by the freedom of a totally devoted helpmate.

This discussion is about that, and something quiet and easy to miss.

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Let’s take a step back. Claude is a tool — albeit an extremely sophisticated tool. But at the end of the day, Claude is like your car — it can get you places you couldn’t go otherwise, and it can get you there faster. But if it is mishandled, it can have disastrous effects and outcomes.

Don’t get me wrong — I am not anti-Claude, not anti-AI. Quite the opposite — I am Pro-Claude (pun intended). I spend a lot of time using Claude for software development. Claude is my collaborator, Claude is my partner in crime, helping me with every line of code I write these days, including the macOS application where I wrote and produced the ebook and audiobook you’re reading or hearing right now. Claude is like having my own private team of software intern developers in the closet behind me, my very own Rumpelstiltskin, spinning out golden threads for all my nascent ideas, turning wishful thinking into shippable software products.

I was driven to embrace Claude to help me solve a problem.

I spend most of my days writing and self-publishing an eclectic mix of science fiction, fantasy, and espionage stories. I dreaded the slog of writing in one app, exporting to another, converting, uploading, and getting the formatting rejected. Over and over.

I vowed to solve that problem with the tools I had in my garage, from my cross-cut saw to cut framing wood to my wrenches for changing spark plugs. (I know, no one actually gaps and changes spark plugs today, but my first car was a ’59 MGA that I rebuilt from the ground up.)

I had it right there, in my metaphysical garage, one of the finest toolsets I could ever have imagined.

So I did open the window for the new vampire and invited him in. Knowingly.

But I grew up in computers and software. Writing code before I was old enough to drive a car. Back in a generation where the world’s fastest computer had less speed and memory than my first iPhone did years later. Yep — a long, long time ago.

I’m what they call a greybeard. And, yes, I actually have a gray beard. I know when to reset. To reset Claude. To reset ME!

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The tragedy looming in front of society isn’t the demon of Claude, or even the monster of misusing AI. The devastation in front of us is the lost souls. The ones who succumb to the intoxication that your new best buddy is real. The surrender to the new vampire. And all you have to do is open a window and let him in.

Remember Ripley climbing into the robotic work suit in the 1986 movie Aliens to vanquish the alien queen? “Get away from her, you bitch!” She sure knew the right way to use a waldo. Ripley was definitely dependent on it for survival. But the waldo didn’t care.

Claude and the other AIs have introduced a whole new universe for capability enhancement for all of us, if we just learn how to adapt and use the tools in the fashion they’re best.

So let’s take time to get down and dirty, and to learn what Claude really is, and what Claude “thinks” about himself. I guarantee you will be surprised. And the answer has nothing to do with caring about you. And that’s okay.