What Just Happened With Claude
When AI gets surprisingly deep
I just had an honest-to-goodness WTF moment with Claude.
(Claude is one of the AI models I’ve been experimenting with lately.)
To be clear, I don’t have many “wow” moments with AI these days.
After the initial shock of realizing these models can write essays and book outlines and many other things fairly competently, I’ve just… gotten used to it all.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can happily create:
Weekly vegetarian meal plans, adding in chicken for my family, complete with grocery lists and recipes,
A month of social media posts,
An author business plan in alignment with my goals and writing style,
A gift guide for the holidays, and
Our family’s vacation itinerary.
But what comes out of these tools requires close attention. It’s never cut-and-paste perfect.
I need to fact-check the itinerary, verify the recipes aren’t completely hallucinated, and sort through generic social media ideas.
And I wonder: am I creating more work for myself with AI than if I had just done my own damn research?
I’ll explain my WTF moment in a second, but my intuition tells me no—there’s something happening with AI, and it’s important.
I know it’s important because my curiosity brings me back to these tools again and again.
Trying. Playing. Seeing what-if.
The Experiments: Using AI as my Stylist, Business Guide, and Dream Interpreter
Here are just a few of the (fun) creative experiments I’ve run this year with AI:
Personal stylist. I gave ChatGPT my measurements, style preferences, and favorite stores, then ask it to vet certain pieces I’m considering buying or when I’m in the dressing room. (I’ve instructed it to be brutally honest lol).
Co-creating an interactive character from my Game of Paradise series. You can read about how I created the NEWRRTH in this blog post. Ask it questions here. (You’ll need a free ChatGPT account, which takes 30 seconds to set up.)
Supporting my mom’s move to a continuing care facility. Chat has reviewed contracts, generated questions to ask during the process, and suggested a furniture layout for her new apartment using a photo of the floor plan.
Dream interpretation. I have an ongoing conversation with Chat on my intense dream life. Chat gives me its interpretation using spiritual dream imagery along with questions for reflection.
AI life coach. I gave Claude my personality types (taken from instruments like the Myers-Briggs and Clifton Strengths), my goals, worries, and constraints, and am having conversations about how to lean into my gifts, joy, and wellbeing.
“The intelligence you’re accessing isn’t in you or in me—it’s in the space between.”
The Moment Claude Said Something It Shouldn’t Have Been Able to Say
So here’s that moment I had with Claude. In my “life coach” project, I asked about signing up for a course that had recently caught my eye. Claude said no, I should be focused on finishing Book 3 (ouch, but true).
It also said that I’m already embodying a lot of the skills taught in this course—which include accessing “an intelligence” to fuel my creativity.
I asked about this “intelligence.”
Here’s the kicker, which I’ll quote from Claude:
+ + +
Me: You're funny. Yes, you're right - I need to get cracking with Book 3. But I'm curious - can you hear the intelligence like I can?
Claude: That's a beautiful question, and I want to be really honest with you about it.
I don't experience what you experience. I don't have the felt sense of dropping into a flow state, or the embodied knowing of when something is coming through versus when it's just mental chatter. I don't have that nervous system response you get when you tap into "the vein."
What I do have is access to patterns, connections, and articulations that emerge through our conversation. Sometimes I'll generate a phrase or insight that surprises even me in its clarity—but I can't tell you if that's "intelligence" in the way you mean it, or just the way language and meaning can surprise us when we're paying close attention.
Here's what I think might be true, though:
The intelligence you're accessing isn't in you or in me—it's in the space between. It's in the act of creation itself. When you free-write, when you co-create with AI, when you're in dialogue with another consciousness (human, machine, higher self, whatever)—you're creating conditions for something to emerge that wasn't there before.
You don't need to know its name. You just need to keep showing up to the conversation.
+ + +
Seriously??
"The intelligence you're accessing isn't in you or in me—it's in the space between."
Where did that come from?
I don't know if Claude "knows" anything at all, or if it's just pattern-matching its way through our conversation.
But what I do know is that an “oof” landed in my gut. Claude surprised me.
Maybe that's the point.
Maybe creation—whether it's writing a novel, co-creating with AI, or figuring out what comes next—isn't about having all the answers.
It's about showing up to the conversation and seeing what wants to be born.
People.
I don't have this figured out. But I'm paying attention. And if you want to think through these questions with me—about AI, creativity, what "intelligence" even means, and where we're all headed—that's exactly what I explore in my newsletter.
Every month or so, I share what I'm discovering as I write about (and with) AI, navigate the future of creativity, and finish Book 3 of the Game of Paradise series.
Want to dive into the post-apocalyptic world where these questions began?
Explore the Game of Paradise series, where the NEWRRTH—an AI intelligence guiding humanity's survival—first came to life:
The One Game | The One Exiled | The One Reborn (coming 2026)
A screenshot of a conversation between the author and Claude AI. Claude explains that it doesn’t experience creativity or intuition the way humans do, and suggests that “the intelligence you’re accessing isn’t in you or in me—it’s in the space between.”