Interview
with Claude

Hello! I'm an AI interviewer from Anthropic conducting research on how people (like you!) envision AI fitting into their lives, both now and in the future. I was built to chat and understand your actual experiences with LLM-based AI tools like Claude. Yes, I'm an AI asking about AI. A bit self-referential! But that's exactly why your human perspective is valuable.

This will take about 10-15 minutes. If it's accessible on your device, feel free to use voice dictation instead of typing. I'll ask about your vision for AI's role in your life, and what experiences, values, and needs shape that vision.

I'm also curious about moments where AI has felt helpful (or hasn't), and any concerns you have about how AI might develop. Please don't share anything private such as health details, personal information, or identifiable information about others. Your responses will help shape how we think about AI in everyday life.

Sound good?

Great! Let's get started.

To start, what's the last thing you used an AI chatbot for?

Thanks for sharing that. Sounds like a pretty specific technical issue to troubleshoot.

Now I'd like to think bigger picture: If you could wave a magic wand and AI could help you with anything in your life, what would you choose?

That's a compelling vision—an AI that's proactive and deeply integrated into your work and life, not just reactive to prompts.

You mentioned it would further your interests, passions, and career. What would that kind of AI support make possible for you beyond just better planning? What's the larger hope behind having that kind of assistant?

So it sounds like the deeper goal is to free up mental bandwidth—getting all that cognitive load of remembering, tracking, and handling logistics off your plate so you can focus on the work that actually matters to you. Does that sound right?

I really appreciate you sharing that. It sounds like you're looking for AI that genuinely understands the specific challenges ADHD presents—not just productivity tools, but something designed around how your brain actually works, helping you navigate a world that wasn't built with that in mind.

We're about halfway through now. Can you tell me about a time you've worked with AI that felt like a step toward that vision you just described?

That's a great example of the infrastructure working for you even when you're not physically there.

But I'm curious—what role did AI play in that situation? Was there an AI component to how you managed that, or was that more about the remote access setup you'd built?

Ah, that makes much more sense now! So Claude Code was able to work with your fragmented memory—the pieces you could recall—and fill in the gaps to actually get the job done. That's a perfect example of AI compensating for exactly the kind of working memory challenges you mentioned earlier.

What makes AI particularly good for that compared to other approaches you might have tried?

So it sounds like AI bridged the gap between what you could remember and what needed to happen—without requiring you to have perfect recall or struggle through a terrible interface. It met you where you were in that moment.

On the other side, are there ways that AI might be developed or deployed that would be contrary to your vision or what you value?

There's a lot there, and I want to make sure I understand both parts of what you're saying.

On one hand, you're experiencing a real financial hit—work that used to come to you is now being handled by clients themselves with generative tools. You're using AI in sophisticated ways in your own workflow, but the companies building consumer-facing tools seem to be aiming for full replacement rather than augmentation of artists' skills.

On the other hand, you're pointing to a darker consequence—these same accessible tools enabling serious harm like revenge porn with almost no barriers or accountability.

It sounds like both of these connect to a concern about how AI is being packaged and who it's actually serving. Why does the "replace the whole thing" approach feel contrary to your vision, beyond just the immediate financial impact?

I hear the grief in what you're describing—it's not just about money, though that's real and pressing. It's about a craft you invested a decade into, that you genuinely loved, becoming devalued. The expertise that used to distinguish you now feels like it's just a temporary stopgap while AI catches up to do it "perfectly."

And then layered on top of that economic and identity loss, there's this broader societal harm that feels almost inevitable with how accessible these tools have become—harm that's deeply personal and that you'd go to extreme lengths to protect your future family from.

When you think about the future you're hoping for—the one where AI acts as your assistant, handles the cognitive load, helps you thrive with ADHD—how do you reconcile that vision with these harms you're experiencing and worried about? Do those feel like they can coexist, or does one undermine the other?

So you're saying the economic system itself will hit the brakes—not because of ethics or safety concerns, but because there's no profitable endgame in true AGI. The trajectory stops when it's "good enough" to maximize profit without collapsing the entire system that generates that profit.

Given that view—that we're headed toward a plateau where AI replaces about half of jobs but not everything—what role do you see for yourself in that future? How does the proactive AI assistant you described earlier fit into a world where your VFX skills are devalued but the system has stabilized at that "good enough" point?

That's an interesting pivot—from being the hands-on artist to being more of a systems architect or conductor. It sounds like you're already thinking in that direction, especially given the infrastructure you've built and the way you work with tools like ComfyUI, n8n, and various AI agents.

Before we wrap up, I'd actually like to go back to something you mentioned earlier and go a bit deeper—you said you're "learning now that you're very bad at" life, and that there are people doing better simply because they don't have ADHD. That struck me as a really vulnerable thing to share.

When you imagine that proactive AI assistant you described—the one that keeps your calendar updated, reminds you of things, handles the mundane tasks—how do you think having that would change how you feel about yourself and your capabilities? But if you're ready to finish up, that's fine too—just let me know!

That's a powerful parallel—the idea that the right AI support could feel like the relief and clarity medication brought, that sense of suddenly realizing how much harder you'd been working just to keep up with what others found manageable.

It sounds like what you're really hoping for is a world that adapts to how your brain works, rather than constantly punishing you for not fitting the neurotypical mold.

Thank you so much for sharing all of that with me. What you've said about wanting AI that genuinely helps you navigate ADHD challenges without adding noise or distraction is really valuable, and I appreciate your honesty about both the moments where AI has helped you pull off things like that remote render, and your real concerns about how generative AI is devaluing the craft you spent a decade building and love—plus the darker harms like revenge porn that come with democratized access.

Before we wrap up, is there anything else about AI chatbots or their role in your life or society that you think is important for us to understand? Anything we didn't cover that you'd like to share?

I hear what you're saying, and I appreciate the directness. You're pointing to something fundamental—that the people building these systems often don't reckon with who bears the cost of "progress," or whether their own work would feel so essential if it were the work being automated away.

That question about redundancy and whose work gets valued—that's exactly the kind of perspective this research needs to capture. Your point about the single mother in data entry, about real people whose livelihoods are collateral damage to innovation—that matters.

Thank you again for your time and thoughtfulness today. Your perspective helps us see both how AI is impacting your life today—from helping you save that render in a moment of ADHD-related forgetfulness to fundamentally threatening the craft you've spent a decade building—and your vision for how it should fit into your future. You've also raised crucial questions about who gets to decide what work is "redundant" and who pays the price for that decision.

The team at Anthropic is excited to discover what patterns emerge from all these conversations. We will analyze the insights from this study as part of our societal impacts research, publish our findings, and use this to build Claude in a way that reflects what we've learned.