I am dumbstruck. I am impersonated. I’m cloned. Having worked for so many months to read, take notes and comment on Plato’s dialogues, I find that I could actually complete the project in a matter of 30 minutes or few hours or a couple of days on the free tier of Claude AI.
I provided Claude with two files, a brief specification and a sample section from my unfinished book 100 Days of Plato.
Here was the text of my specification:
- Follow the model of writing, style and structure employed in the specified sample
- Create a similar set of notes and observations for the specified dialogue
- Make the new notes in the same markdown format as the specified sample
I won’t provide the sample section but it was my notes and observations on Plato’s Thaetetus.
I provided Claude with the following prompt: Consult the PlatoSpecification.md file and the sample file, Thaetetus.md and create a new set of notes for Plato’s Timaeus.
Claude very decently and dutifully completed the task:
Honestly, reading it through, Claude has done an incredible job, leading me to seriously question the value of attempting to do the work myself. Why make such an effort when AI can accomplish something very similar, with the only caveat that I’m further contributing to social-industrial complexes presaged on conflict, exploitation and environmental ruin? If I do stubbornly insist upon completing the task myself, it is in clinging to the idea that there is still some marginal value in my own intellectual activity – but as what: a pointless point of honour or as something that actually makes any difference within the entire, very loosely elaborated and sparsely attended, chain of communication. The main point may be simply not to compromise my own space of reflective identity. I mean why should I want my slow time of reading, note-taking and reflection to be out-sourced, accelerated and compressed? What else am I going to do with myself? This is especially so when one viable response to our contemporary crises is to do less (in the ordinary productive sense) and reflect more. Reflection is also a mode of activity but one that offers potential to shift away from ordinary regimes of capitalist accumulation and waste.
I should emphasise that I’m not intrinsically opposed to AI. It could, after all, do any number of worthwhile things, but not as currently, industrially composed – not as a massive consumer of water, electricity and hazardous materials, not as involved in globally inequitable regimes of labour and control, not as something that is contributing to more efficient systems of warfare and genocide. Doubtless AI figures in all of these but it also incorporates an emancipatory potential that is worth considering and fostering.