This week has been busy with the enjoyable task of hosting a distinguished economist in Alabama. I can only briefly follow up on my campfire post. (Yes, this is apropos of everything.)
I do not usually use LLMs to write even part of my posts but since I am pressed for time, I will just take this as a chance to assess Claude. I pay for Claude and Grok, currently. Both of those subscriptions resulted from a particular moment when I thought I could get a particular task done with them and was in a hurry. If I could do it all over again, I would undo those subs, I think, and go more in on the OpenAI Pro products.
Prompt: Finger wagging is surprisingly ineffective; telling a compelling story is surprisingly effective. Can you expand that out into a paragraph for a blog?
Claude response: The art of persuasion often defies our intuitive assumptions. While many of us default to stern lectures and admonishing fingers when trying to change minds, research consistently shows this approach tends to backfire, causing people to become defensive and dig deeper into their existing beliefs. What proves remarkably more effective is the simple act of storytelling. When we encounter a compelling narrative, our brains react differently than they do to facts and figures alone – we become emotionally invested, our neural patterns sync with the story’s flow, and we naturally lower our defensive barriers. Stories create a shared experience that bridges ideological divides, allowing new ideas to take root not through force, but through the gentle power of narrative empathy. This explains why parables and fables have been humanity’s preferred teaching tools for millennia, while memories of being lectured rarely inspire lasting change.
Claude is always a little too verbose, in my opinion. Still, the logic and grammar are good. The machines can write.
I might write more soon about how AI’s used narrative to influence humans in the novel The Diamond Age.
Economist Writing Every Day 