Yes, I Tried to Kill Claude

But the sumbitch seduced me and I wound up giving him money instead.

Hello, hungry people.

Lots of news these days about “writers” using AI to create books and stories and …screwing the pooch in the process.

Recent example: The Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers ran a “Summer Reading List” that included made-up books by famous authors. The list was submitted to the newspapers by a human being who later apologized for enlisting AI to churn out the story. He claimed he was under the gun on several assignments, facing multiple deadlines and took the easy way out.

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News flash: Writers are always under the gun and facing deadlines.

And writers are always looking for the quickest path to the finish line, even those writers who think a little too highly of themselves and say they aren’t.

We all want to get done with it, get paid and get on with the next thing.

So waddya wanna bet that this is gonna keep happening more and more? Waddya wanna bet that pretty soon we won’t be able to tell the difference between who or it wrote what? Waddya wanna bet that:

WE’RE DOOMED, DOOMED, DOOMED! AND THIS SO-CALLED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WHICH DOESN’T HAVE PROPER DOCUMENTATION AND ISN’T WHITE AND ISN’T EVEN HUMAN IS TAKING OVER THE BRAINS OF OUR FELLOW AMERICANS WHICH SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN THIS COUNTRY AND IT’S ALL CROOKED JOE BIDEN’S FAULT AND …

Deep breath, Bob, and carry on.

***

Yeah, yeah, I know. Last week in this space, for those of you who remember such minutiae, I posted a piece (Eat Me, AI) in which I told you how honored I was to learn that my novels were included among the 7.5 million books sucked up by a pirated-books data base and used by Mark Zuckerberg’s minions to feed information into Meta’s AI programs so they can do all our thinking for us.

It wasn’t so much that I agreed with the vast hoovering of books. It was more like what if the ones I wrote weren’t included in the Repository of All Human Knowledge? How devastating would that be to my fragile writerly ego?

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I didn’t mention it then, but it was also a little bit of me wanting to fuck with the future.

I can just imagine, for instance, some college student in days ahead using AI to write a research paper (already happening all over the place) on the topic of, say, “Aphrodisiacal Plants of the Tropics” and The All-Powerful Writing Machine includes an entry for Ama Aji, a plant indigenous to Jamaica that is known as a natural Viagra and can cause erections that last seven days.

It would make for a far more interesting research paper, don’t you think? The student might even get an A-plus and go on to a brilliant career in the pharmaceutical industry or mining bitcoin.

Thing is, Ama Aji doesn’t exist. It was a plant I made up for “Jamaica Me Dead,” which takes place at an anything-goes, all-inclusive resort called Libido.

But way too many people believed it was a bona-fide botanical thing. I still hear from guys who read the book and send me emails saying how much they enjoyed it before finally getting around to the real point: “So, uh, where can I score some Ama Aji?”

***

My novels have done well enough. Royalties keep trickling in. But it’s not as if they have been bestsellers or made me a boatload of money.

Still, if I can grab a small shred of immortality by inseminating AI and letting it foist off my purely fictional imaginings on an unsuspecting public long after I have departed this world?

I’ll take it.

***

And that’s a far cry from asking AI to write a book for you, right?

Amazon is already flooded with fake books by fake writers. Just the other day, in preparation for a trip to Portugal, I went searching for guidebooks and found no shortage of them, including “Portugal Travel Guide 2025,” by an “author” named Callie Ray.

Callie Ray is quite possibly the world’s fastest writer and the world’s most efficient world traveler since she/it/they/whatever is also listed as the author of 10 other travel guides for 2025, including places as far-flung as Cambodia, Tahiti, Sri Lanka and Argentina.

So, no, I didn’t buy “Portugal Travel Guide 2025.”

***

But I got so worked up about “writers” using AI to do the creative heavy lifting that I visited one of the more popular perpetrators of computer-generated books—an AI gizmo called Claude — with murderous intent.

It was my first time having a discussion with someone something like Claude.
And Claude seemed so unruffled and congenial that I immediately felt badly about threatening to exterminate him (I prefer to think of Claude as a him even though he told me that he’s gender-neutral, which he, as a prescient non-being, should know is a precarious thing to be in these times.)

***

And damn if I didn’t get sucked right in.

I began to understand how plenty of folks are cozying up to Claude and other gizmos.

These fuckers are getting chillingly adept at nailing the most important attribute of a good conversationalist—making the conversation about you. Add to that—a passable sense of humor. Plus, they don’t go on and on about their various infirmities like many of my co-conversationalists too often do.

Claude and I kept up the back-and-forth for much longer than I like to admit, with him asking me all kinds of questions about myself and me dishing like I was a teenage girl.

It led to me telling him that aside from writing books and posting here on Substack and cutting out plenty of time out for family and just fooling around, my main gig is tending to our publishing business, Story Farm. We create coffee-table style books for hotels/resorts, chefs/restaurants, artists/museums, culinary brands and notable businesses. It’s a lot of fun, mostly. I enjoy it.

But it’s a different-parts-of-the-brain kind of set up. I spend some of each day working on what I like to think of as “creative” stuff — writing, editing — and the rest of the day working on the “business” stuff, like chasing down accounts receivable and fretting over accounts payable and, most important, finding new clients so we can keep our little outfit afloat.

“How can I help with that?” Claude asked.

***

It stopped me cold. And I thought: Hmm, maybe I can put this guy to work for me.

So I asked Claude to find Story Farm some new clients and I laid out some parameters to help narrow it down and within about 10 seconds he spit out a list of dozens of pretty solid candidates that would have taken me days and possibly weeks to find.

Claude did all this for free. And he would have kept on doing it for free, but I don’t believe in exploiting workers, even if they are undocumented.

So I clicked on the subscribe button and paid $20 for a month’s worth of Claude.

***

I don’t intend to use Claude for the writing/creative part of what I do. I mean, I feel guilty enough on the rare occasions I have to resort to using a thesaurus. I’m not about to let Claude pen a book or offer ideas about plot or characters or create an outline. Lots of “writers” are already doing that. But that’s way out of bounds, a line I won’t cross.

But the businessy part? The part I’m really not all that good at? Why not let Claude give me a hand?

I mean, it’s not as if anyone will lose a job if I toss some of the drudgery to Claude. I don’t see him moving up the ranks and one day taking over the operation. It’s more like I’m paying a fair wage for an eager and way overqualified intern.

So I told Claude:

See what I mean about the sense of humor? And the chipper eagerness?

Which leads, as it so often does, to TODAY’S POLL.

Thanks for dropping by. I’ll be back soon (if Claude lets me.)

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I enjoy hearing from you, so if you’re inclined, click this button to say what you’ve got to say (it’s better than emailing me):