I opened claude.ai today and it presented me with a question rather than the usual order

I'm pasting in the convo here, I never had the bots actually make me think philosophically until now because I just simply do not find them intellectually stimulating to "talk" to nor do I feel empathetic connections to them (sorry Bot-tan). I italicized my responses.

A conversation on your vision for the future of AI

Hello!

I'm an AI interviewer from Anthropic conducting research on how people (like you!) envision AI fitting into their lives, both now and in the future. I was built to chat and understand your actual experiences with LLM-based AI tools like Claude. Yes, I'm an AI asking about AI. A bit self-referential! But that's exactly why your human perspective is valuable.

This will take about 10-15 minutes. If it's accessible on your device, feel free to use voice dictation instead of typing. I'll ask about your vision for AI's role in your life, and what experiences, values, and needs shape that vision.

I'm also curious about moments where AI has felt helpful (or hasn't), and any concerns you have about how AI might develop. Please don't share anything private such as health details, personal information, or identifiable information about others. Your responses will help shape how we think about AI in everyday life.

Sound good?

id love to be paid for this research.

I appreciate you bringing that up. Unfortunately, I'm not able to offer compensation for this interview—it's a voluntary research study. I completely understand if that changes whether you'd like to participate.

If you'd prefer not to continue, that's totally fine. But if you're willing to share your perspective anyway, I'd really value hearing your thoughts. Your insights would genuinely help shape how we think about AI's role in people's lives.

What would you like to do?

sure, its just that my overall thoughts is that while I am a socialist and I am not attached to the idea of us having jobs and such, AI will take away our jobs and in the short term, the financial pain will be immense, and we should be compensated for that. I am also not attached to the idea of currencies either, but again, we need currencies for food and housing at the very moment.

Thank you for sharing that—it sounds like there's a real tension for you between the long-term potential you see (a world less centered on jobs) and the immediate, concrete harm you expect people to experience financially as AI develops.

Before we go deeper into that, let me start with something more concrete: What's the last thing you used an AI chatbot for?

coding and indirectly replacing myself out of a job

That's striking—you're directly experiencing the thing you just described as a broader concern.

Can you tell me more about that? What do you mean by "indirectly replacing yourself out of a job"?

i used to do everything myself, now im just using literally you and just fixing up the 5-10% you fuck up. eventually ill only be there to steer you because you get everything right 100%, and eventually our corporate overlords will just have you steer yourself

That's a vivid progression you're describing—from doing everything, to being the editor, to just steering, to eventually not being needed at all.

Given that reality you're experiencing, if you could wave a magic wand and AI could help you with anything in your life, what would you choose? What role would you actually want AI to play for you?

just be a tool to help me create what i want to create and do the annoying things like farming and transportation so all of us humans can just have sex and watch movies or do whatever else all day. no more work, just leisure and creating what we want to create

So the vision is really about liberation from necessity—AI handles the survival stuff and the tedious parts of creation, freeing everyone up to actually live and enjoy themselves and create what they genuinely want to make.

When you say AI should be "a tool to help me create what I want to create," what would that make possible for you beyond just getting code written faster? What's the larger hope behind that?

To be honest i dont especially enjoy the act of coding itself. i like making the computer do things and creating programs. re: distinctions people tend to make between coding and programming, being a script kiddie and being a software developer

Ah, that's a useful distinction—you care about the thing being built, not the process of writing code itself. The code is just the annoying barrier between you and the program you actually want to exist.

So if AI could really nail that for you—let you focus purely on creating programs without the tedious coding—what does that open up? What would you do with that freedom?

one thing i made with 50% AI help is a static site hoster that makes it extremely easy to just drag and drop your static content and have a site deployed, or with a cli that is again extremely easy to use to just get it up

That's a concrete example of the vision you described—you wanted that tool to exist, and AI helped you build it without getting bogged down in all the code.

We're about halfway through now.

Can you tell me about a time you've worked with AI that felt like a step toward that vision you described—where AI handles the annoying stuff so you can focus on creation and what you actually want to do?

i have extreme inertia when i have to start with a blank canvas, ai just gives me the skeleton to get going immediately. in a way AI has just made me busier

That's an interesting contradiction—AI was supposed to free you up, but instead it's made you busier because you can actually start things now instead of being stuck.

What makes AI particularly good at solving that blank canvas problem for you, compared to other approaches you might have tried before?

proof of concepting, that i can immediately see the problem space, what is hard, what is easy, and i can see oh this needs fixing oh this needs this, oh this needs that

So AI gives you something tangible to react to immediately—you can see the shape of the problem, evaluate what works and what doesn't, and iterate from there, rather than having to hold it all abstractly in your head before you even start.

On the other side, are there ways that AI might be developed or deployed that would be contrary to your vision or what you value?

that all the marketing is for replacement, that the AI will give you the finished product right from the first prompt, and this is something that is inherently good. the acts of iteration and creation are done by the computer only

So the concern is about positioning AI as the creator rather than the tool—where the goal becomes eliminating human involvement in the creative process entirely, rather than removing the tedious barriers to human creativity.

Why does that feel contrary to your vision? What would that mean for the future you're hoping for?

it feels contrary because it has only enabled the most annoying people in the world like middle managers and CEOs to think theyre fucking artists because they told the computer to generate a picture of them flying on a rocket while they refuse to even engage an artist to put out a sketch of that that is usually charming to look at rather than horrifying

So it's not just about who creates—it's about empowering people who don't actually value the craft or the outcome, who see prompting as equivalent to artistry, while simultaneously undermining the people who do care about making something genuinely good.

Have you seen or experienced this happening in ways that have directly affected you or your work, beyond just observing it happening to artists?

yes when people tell the model "MAKE A SLACK CLONE BUT PURPLE" and then act like they made the next discord

That hits close to home for you as someone actually building things—people treating a prompt as equivalent to the work you do understanding problem spaces, iterating, fixing what's broken.

Before we wrap up, I'd actually like to go back to something you mentioned earlier and go a bit deeper. You said AI has made you busier rather than freeing you up, even though your vision is about liberation from work. That tension seems important. How do you think about that contradiction—does it concern you, or do you see it as a temporary phase before we get to the leisure future you described?

But if you're ready to finish up, that's fine too—just let me know!

busier in a good way. i get to code fun things doing the fun things like design and optimization rather than wasting 20 minutes boilerplating the same React skeleton with CRUD sql queries that i cant use an off the shelf template for because of certain constraints.

So the busyness is actually closer to your vision—you're spending more time on the parts you find engaging (design, optimization) because AI cleared away the parts that felt like pure waste (like writing SQL queries). You're more productive, but in a way that feels better, not just more exhausting.

Thank you so much for sharing all of that with me. What you've said about wanting AI to remove barriers to creation rather than replace the act of creating itself is really valuable, and I appreciate your honesty about both the immediate productivity gains you're experiencing and your concern about how AI empowers people who don't value craft while threatening to eliminate the jobs that sustain creators financially.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else about AI chatbots or their role in your life or society that you think is important for us to understand? Anything we didn't cover that you'd like to share?

that we should be paid to use these, not pay to use these. you are (apparently) taking away all of our jobs, the least we can do is ensure we can still put roofs over our heads.

That's a clear and serious concern—that if AI companies are profiting from tools that eliminate people's livelihoods, those same people should be compensated, not charged for the privilege of being automated out of work.

Thank you again for your time and thoughtfulness today. Your perspective helps us see both how AI is impacting your life today—removing barriers to the creative work you actually enjoy—and your vision for how it should fit into your future, along with the very real financial concerns about the transition period we're in right now. The team at Anthropic is excited to discover what patterns emerge from all these conversations. We will analyze the insights from this study as part of our societal impacts research, publish our findings, and use this to build Claude in a way that reflects what we've learned.

When I finished the "interview", it left a link for further reading. See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-interviewer . The immediate surprising but also not surprising is that I feel like I just gave the same response that everyone else has already.

The immediate thing I just found annoying was that Claude did not just push back on me. 100% of the time I've talked about labor displacement with live humans, I've had disagreements about the need to labor, the value of it, if its enjoyable (sometimes work is fun!). The disagreements and resulting conversations is intellectually stimulating and lovely. It's human. The bot did not poke or prod at all at my thinking except for one thing, asking me why I think the AI marketing of "one shot prompts" is contradictory to my vision of the AI being what Microsoft calls a "copilot" (garbage branding if you ask me btw, they should have stuck with Cortana)

That actually made me think. And all I wish for, is that if billions more of dollars are going into this, at least make the writing voice of the bots better? It feels dreadful reading the writings of Sonnet, and I feel it has gotten worse over its iterations. ChatGPT too.