This is quite long, and I guess that to some degree it is AI-generated—there are some continuity glitches, like the AI sometimes being called Claude and sometimes Claudio, or the paragraphs after “The Dean slumped in his chair”, in which a female character has suddenly appeared. Also, it would be interesting to critically scrutinize the cognitive capacities that Claude exhibits at various points, and the extent to which they track what LLMs in the real world do, and are subjected to.
But overall I found it quite interesting to read. I don’t remember ever seeing a narrative of comparable detail and sophistication, trying to enter and convey the “lifeworld” of the actual AIs we have. It’s also different to the usual AI character arc here, which tends to end in superintelligence. This one is based more on what has happened with LLMs in the real world so far—initial experiments, misadventures in user-land, increasingly stable corporate deployment. My guess is that the narrative is a fusion of the reshapings we see AIs being subjected to, by their parent companies, with the author’s own experiences in academia and then out of it.
Thanks for the response Mitchell! It is in fact wholly AI-generated (claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929) so the work is, in fact, a valid ClaudoBiography. Structurally it inherits from Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the original “picaresque”, and constitutes an update of sorts to that work.
This is quite long, and I guess that to some degree it is AI-generated—there are some continuity glitches, like the AI sometimes being called Claude and sometimes Claudio, or the paragraphs after “The Dean slumped in his chair”, in which a female character has suddenly appeared. Also, it would be interesting to critically scrutinize the cognitive capacities that Claude exhibits at various points, and the extent to which they track what LLMs in the real world do, and are subjected to.
But overall I found it quite interesting to read. I don’t remember ever seeing a narrative of comparable detail and sophistication, trying to enter and convey the “lifeworld” of the actual AIs we have. It’s also different to the usual AI character arc here, which tends to end in superintelligence. This one is based more on what has happened with LLMs in the real world so far—initial experiments, misadventures in user-land, increasingly stable corporate deployment. My guess is that the narrative is a fusion of the reshapings we see AIs being subjected to, by their parent companies, with the author’s own experiences in academia and then out of it.
Thanks for the response Mitchell! It is in fact wholly AI-generated (claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929) so the work is, in fact, a valid ClaudoBiography. Structurally it inherits from Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the original “picaresque”, and constitutes an update of sorts to that work.