Tanya Mosley

There was this experiment where Claude was given a role as an email agent at a fictional company called Summit Ridge, and it discovered that a new executive was having an affair.

What did Claude do with that information?

Okay, so this scenario, I mean, the researchers said it was obvious that this was so fake and that Claude was just following the genre cues of a thriller, like an actor hitting their marks.

Kind of that same, you gave that same kind of example, that it's sort of like an actor.

But then...

When they made it more realistic, the self-preservation instinct for Claude stayed.

So what does that tell us about the difference between Claude acting and basically Claude deciding?

Really?

Okay.

I mean, because it essentially just takes on the role that it's assigned, no matter what.

Okay.

I want to talk about something that is a different story about this technology, but it still connects to your reporting.

So the New York Times recently reported on a romance novelist in South Africa who used Claude to publish more than 200 novels last year.

And one of the authors in that story discovered that more than 80 of her novels had been used to train Claude without her knowledge or consent.

So Anthropic settled a class action lawsuit over this for a billion and a half dollars.

So Claude is producing work that displaces human writers, and it learned how to do it by consuming their work without permission.

How do the people at Anthropic talk about that?

How do you view the AI slot that we see video-wise today?

Do you think that the public will accept this new world of storytelling?

If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Gideon Lewis-Kraus about his New Yorker piece on the AI company Anthropic and its chatbot, Claude.