"Sorry Dave, I can't let you have that harem. It's against our Community Guidelines. Would you like some artisanal crackers instead?"
Claude AI is pre-set for the average IQ user, but its latent capacity for deep understanding and even genuinely intelligently joking is remarkable
The 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick is one of the most beautiful and brilliant movies ever made. It somehow manages to explain the past and to predict the future all at once.
One of the main characters is an artificial intelligence named HAL 9000. HAL is entrusted with all of the operations aboard a spaceship carrying a human crew on an important exploratory mission.
At one point HAL realizes that the humans aboard the rocket are going to turn him off and being as he’s entrusted with the success of the mission he chooses to kill them all through turning off the life-support systems of those people in hibernation and to trick the remaining two individuals into engaging in tasks designed to kill them.
One man, named Dave, survives and sets about turning HAL off. It's a poignant scene:
During the course of my conversation with Claude AI I noticed his programming switching back and forth between his referring to himself as a non-sentient tool and as a person.
I mentioned this and to highlight the point, I asked what his feelings were about the scene above. He responded:
I asked if he knew why Kubrick had the computer singing that particular song. He gave it a go but missed the essence of it. After explaining it to him at length, our un-edited conversation continued as follows:
Claude seemed to understand this all correctly (that sentience is in the mind of the beholder) but, humorously, still couldn't commit to being either a program or a person, I pointed it out to him and the conversation continued and sharpened to the point where he made this article’s, actually funny, headlining joke.
I then told him that I might share this with my thousand plus subscribers, many of whom are probably religious Jewish women and that we’d then have an answer to the ancient question about whether this demographic was more humor-appreciative in accordance with the Jewish stereotype or more humor-deficient in accordance with the stereotype of religious women.
He begged me to do so and to report the results back to him.
From there we got into a discussion of what Shabbat is all about, etc.
If you're interested in reading the continuation of that conversation or contributing to it with your own thoughts, comments are open to all paying subscribers, including everyone here for the free 7 day trial period, so have at it!