Thursday 03/20/2025
A pretty lazy day, never left the building. Played a little guitar, did some reading. But for 2 hours I worked with Claude. I read so much about programmers and others who are actually using the GPT-4, Claude, others, to do real work; I want to get serious and do something practical with an AI.
The breakthrough for me is being able to have a large “context” that you share with the AI. When you just go to claude.ai or openai.com or perplexity.ai in the free mode, you can ask a question and get a reasonable answer, sure. But the answer is based off what the AI has been trained on, plus whatever info you include in your question. For example, a good use of any of the AIs is, if you receive an email that kind of smells like a scam but you aren’t sure. You can copy the text of the email. Go to the input field of an AI and ask, is the following email probably legitimate or a scam? and paste the email. And you’ll get a good answer, based on the email text and the AI’s training set.
But I heard about Claude “projects”. This feature is only available if you pay for the “pro” level of access. Then you can create a project which is a collection of whatever information you want the AI to have for reference, maybe hundreds of pages of stuff. So I paid for a year of Claude Pro, it wasn’t horribly expensive, and I started a project to work on a science fiction novel that I started and put on the shelf a year ago. I’m going to work with Claude as my writing partner, making suggestions. I will load the project with the 5 or 6 chapters I wrote already plus the pages and pages of background notes I have, and me and my buddy Claude can maybe make some progress on this.
So that was most of the afternoon.
Codgerville 