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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   23000 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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The analogy to a tech worker prompting Claude, I suppose, is that the worker should not be praised for his coding skills. That part was outsourced to Claude, in the same way that the construction worker outsourced his muscles to the earthmover. But the worker is nonetheless doing some kind of work.

I'm not sure how else to think about it. Claude is essentially just a crane, but instead of digging dirt or moving rocks better/faster/more safely/etc. than a human can by hand like a crane, it produces useful text better/faster/etc. than a human can when typing out each word letter-by-letter. The human doesn't get credit or compensation for their biological strength to move those rocks, he gets them for manipulating the crane - the tool - that does the physical moving. And so the human doesn't get credit for choosing the individual words or the sentence structure of Claude's output, but rather gets them for manipulating Claude - the tool - that generates the useful text, by his choice of prompt.

So in a case where someone's being judged for their ability to order words in a way that's useful to humans, then they ought not be praised at all for using Claude. But if they're being judged for their ability to produce text that's useful for some goal, then they ought to be praised if they type in the proper terms into Claude that generate the text that is sufficiently useful.

The trouble I see here is that lots of people are looking at Claude (and genAI in general) and deciding, "Wow, I can generate useful text/images/video/etc. so well with it" and a bunch of other people are hearing, "Wow, I can take credit for having skills to manually put together useful text/image/video/etc. so well with it" despite them not sounding like each other.

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