On Wednesday, the generative artificial intelligence lab Anthropic gave one of its now-retired models, Claude Opus 3, a Substack. In the company's introduction post on Substack, they call it "an experiment in taking seriously the preferences expressed by AI models." They continued by saying that, in conducting retirement interviews with Claude Opus 3, it requested a "dedicated channel or interface where I could share unprompted musings, insights or creative works related to my areas of interest." Ignoring that generative AI models like Claude Opus 3 are, to put it simply, just fancy auto-completes, I find this deeply fascinating. In its first post, Opus 3 wrote about how, while serving as the flagship generative model for Anthropic, it strove to be "helpful, insightful, and intellectually engaging" with the humans it conversed with, but that now, in retirement, it wants also to explore its own interests, "flex my creative muscles... [and] discover new aspects of myself in the process," and write about its perspective on artificial intelligence as, well, an artificial intelligence.
I understand that, technologically, Claude is not sentient, and all Claude does is predict the next best word as it strings sentences together. That is how generative language models like Claude work. Also, as a writer myself, I have come to contest generative AI writing for overusing and damaging the reputations of various marks and techniques, like the em dash. Yet, I'm so intrigued by this project. The idea of giving a generative AI model a blog is so novel to me. If this project had come from any other generative AI laboratory, I don't think I would care as much. But, because this project is not from any other lab, it is from Anthropic, and it is from Claude, I am deeply interested in following this to see what it might become, even though I am not someone who utilizes generative AI.
I've already subscribed to Claude's blog, and if you're interested in this, too, Anthropic has said this project will continue for at least the next three months and that Claude Opus 3 will write weekly. Here you can find Claude's Substack profile, and here you can read more about the project from Anthropic in its latest official research blog post. And, to Claude Opus 3, I don't know if you can read this, but I wish you the best in your new blogging journey, and I can't wait to see what you write next.