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Ah, well done. I've had this idea for months now and wrote up a semi rambling draft of the post around midnight yesterday after a long day, asked Claude Opus 4.6 to take it and give it structure but didn't like the result, it was too bland and read like a "safe unsafe" newspaper op ed you'd find from one of the better writers in The Financial Times, asked for something less corporate and "safe" but no matter how I phrased it all it did was take the text and make it more rightoid, which absolutely wasn't what I was going for, so in the end I decided to take the Claudified Newspaper Op Ed and build the final post upon it from there.
But yes I agree, if you squint the newspaper OP Ed still comes through, for example this paragraph is something I'd never write, or at least never frame in this specific way:
I'd instead have changed it to talk about how it still had a culture of accepting as its input lower human capital from the French upper middle class over genuine talent from the lower classes (however little there may be, it still exists). Again, not because they deliberately shun such people, or at least no right thinking person (and we can be sure the ENA was chock full of right thinking people) does so overtly, but rather because of structural failures meaning that lower class talent never even seriously considered applying to the ENA, and the institution was fine with that continuing state of affairs. But again, that's a problem with the filter applied to at the beginning of the ENA process, it doesn't have any bearing on whether the forge once you are inside the process is of poor quality, and we can see that even the mediocre spawn of the French UMC emerged from the ENA better for the experience. The issues with the ENA was the "American" part of it, not the continental part. A shame that the baby had to be thrown out with the bathwater to satisfy the baying mob, but the common people have never really understood nuance.
I did change many many paragraphs from what Claude gave me and rewrote them from scratch or at most only taking some rhetorical turns of phrase that worked well and incorporating them into my own paragraph. In my daze at 1am yesterday I missed that paragraph and looking at the post again this morning some other things that I'd phrase differently if were an editor and the above post had been given to me.
Think of it as someone who designed the blueprints for a building themselves, outsourced the skeleton structure to a contractor, wasn't happy with the result they gave and so decided to finish the rest of the building themselves rather than knock it down and start from scratch. I genuinely don't know what percentage is "AI" or even whether you can put a number on it given my original draft and how heavily I worked the Op Ed it gave me into something that was fit to print. But if you insist, my median guess is going to be something like 33%, give or take.
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