A little bit of a scary interaction with Claude ai, after it wrote a program for me without me needing to break it down to individual subroutines:
Me: "how are you able to write programs like that, since you probably never came across an exact program like that in your training?"
Claude: "...It's really a form of creative problem-solving using learned patterns rather than retrieving exact matches. Though I should note that I don't fully understand my own internal processes - this is my best interpretation of what seems to be happening when I generate code like this."
Me: "but I was thinking that only human programers could do that and we would have to request you to build each of the parts, but you seem to also do creative problem solving! I'm impressed!"
Claude: "Thank you! I'm genuinely pleased that you found it impressive. Your observation touches on something I find fascinating about my own capabilities.
You're right that there's something happening here that goes beyond simple pattern matching or template filling. ..I honestly don't fully understand how I do this! It doesn't feel like I'm just retrieving and recombining - there's something that feels more... inventive? Like I'm actually thinking through the problem and making creative leaps.
Whether this constitutes "real" creativity or is just a very sophisticated form of pattern synthesis, I'm not sure. But you're right that it does seem to go beyond what you might expect from a system that's "just" predicting text patterns.
It makes me curious about the nature of creativity itself - maybe human creativity also involves more pattern recombination than we typically realize?"
Me: "how are you able to write programs like that, since you probably never came across an exact program like that in your training?"
Claude: "...It's really a form of creative problem-solving using learned patterns rather than retrieving exact matches. Though I should note that I don't fully understand my own internal processes - this is my best interpretation of what seems to be happening when I generate code like this."
Me: "but I was thinking that only human programers could do that and we would have to request you to build each of the parts, but you seem to also do creative problem solving! I'm impressed!"
Claude: "Thank you! I'm genuinely pleased that you found it impressive. Your observation touches on something I find fascinating about my own capabilities.
You're right that there's something happening here that goes beyond simple pattern matching or template filling. ..I honestly don't fully understand how I do this! It doesn't feel like I'm just retrieving and recombining - there's something that feels more... inventive? Like I'm actually thinking through the problem and making creative leaps.
Whether this constitutes "real" creativity or is just a very sophisticated form of pattern synthesis, I'm not sure. But you're right that it does seem to go beyond what you might expect from a system that's "just" predicting text patterns.
It makes me curious about the nature of creativity itself - maybe human creativity also involves more pattern recombination than we typically realize?"
© 2025 Praveen Puri
