I was unfaithful
Today I cheated on ChatGPT. I signed up for Claude, because I kept hearing it was the best at words.
I’ve been doing a bit of personal research into a local artist I really like. For a start, I wanted to know if he was the son of a much more famous artist (no, nephew).
Claude as a research assistant was…interesting. It was highly conversational. It wrote very well (something it’s famous for), but it is obviously built to engage in human-like back and forth. Including paying me a few slightly uncomfortable compliments. It was a bit like having my shin humped by an enthusiastic little dog.
It put our conversation together into a Word document for download. If anything significantly changed, it wrote an updated document. Not bad. It made one obvious error a human wouldn’t make – it misunderstood a parent/child relationship. And it lied to me at least once – it told me it would forget our conversation and start over if I asked it to, then it didn’t. But its prose was nearly ready out of the box. It didn’t sound like me, of course, but it was serviceable.
And yes, it did start by asking what it should call me and I told it Weasel.
If I had to sum up – Claude is a conversation simulator, ChatGPT is (over) eager to help and Grok is a snarky teenager. They’re all pretty good as research assistants, though – if you verify.
February 18, 2026 — 7:19 pm
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