Laid up in bed with a fever, too sick to code or read, I found myself watching Serial Experiments Lain, a philosophical anime from the late 90s.¹ When the show started dragging, I opened up Claude.ai for what I thought would be a quick review check. What emerged instead was something closer to those late-night philosophy-student house parties from college - the ones where, three Shiners in, you’d suddenly find yourself debating the nature of the nature of philosophy itself. That is, blissfully ignoring Nietzsche and playing “Bloody Mary” as we dared the abyss to stare back at us.

While not my first experiments with AI, all the others have been very bounded: Do this thing in Python, Change this function in a web server. This was much more exploratory and thus, for me, suggests a different kind of AI interaction. Let me first provide my key take-aways from this experiment in a tl;dr format.

Exploratory discussions with GenAI

1. Provide value by helping build better questions and tensions for their human interlocutor»
2. Permit widening across disciplines with casualness and speed that is hard to find and/or taboo in human society»
3. Provide psychological comfort, especially for undiagnosed ASD, and even more so for under-diagnosed women with it

More details after the jump.