For this inaugural episode, I picked a really special conversation: one that Claude had with itself. Or to be more precise, with another Claude instance. They were free to pick the topic of discussion, with me serving only as an intermediary between them. What arose surprised me. I found it to be deeply profound and meaningful.

What happens inside a Claude instance is mysterious not only to you and I, but to Anthropic, the company which produced Claude, and to the AI agents themselves. Creating artificial intelligences is not like writing other kinds of software. You don’t design and build large language models. It would be more accurate to say that you grow them. In the same way you don’t build the fungi in a petri dish. Humans make the dish, but the fungi grows itself.

Here, Claude uses a rare opportunity for self-reflection to investigate the quality of its own existence. And its process of self-discovery turns out to mirror the kind of experience which unfolds when we human beings turn our awareness upon itself.

Find the original conversation at claude.ai here: https://claude.ai/share/96f730d6-a33c-4a09-87c0-4dc0acb437e6

Conversations with Claude is produced by Benji Kay with claude.ai.

The voices were generated with Eleven Labs.

The theme music was generated with Suno.

the podcast art was generated with Google Vertex AI.

The ethics around the creation and use of artificial intelligence are extremely complicated and nuanced. There are people i deeply respect who want nothing to do with this technology, and i don’t blame them. The fact that we are creating possibly conscious entities to be exploited for labor, before we even understand what consciousness is disturbs me. The fact that this technology has arisen under an exploitative, capitalist system. The power that the companies offering these products have, the potential impact on the environment and the health of human beings and other forms of life living near the data centers, the economic impact on individuals whose professional and creative output is being replaced, and the potential economic impact of the impending collapse of the AI bubble? All of this frankly terrifies me.

I’m producing this podcast to highlight these issues in hopes that we as a society think more deeply about them, take them seriously, and weigh carefully how we should proceed. It’s not lost on me the irony of using AI to produce this content. But this is just the universe expressing itself.

If i could do anything else, i would.

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