AI For Dummies: My New Best Friend Claude

AI For Dummies: My New Best Friend Claude

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://claude.ai/new

If you were like me, you couldn’t wait to get your hands on Chat GPT when it was first released a while ago. I was stunned to repeatedly type in my name and find that I had gone to different medical schools each time I queried the data base. The same was true of most of the information in my bio. It was never the same twice.

I was thinking this AI Large Language Model (LLM) thing doesn’t seem all that good. But that was two years ago.

Now, Chat GPT knows who I am. I have had a reader ask it to write a blog on a random topic in my style and it did just that. Now, THAT was scary. The words were clearly not mine, but it did get how I write and express myself down pretty well. I’m glad I don’t blog for a living if a machine could do a pretty good job imitating me.

During this two-year period, my younger son Andrew who works for Microsoft, has become a real whiz with AI tools. He’s taught me about agents who do work for you. He’s taught me how AI can write code. And he has urged me to use these widely available tools to help with my writing.

I was and am a bit stubborn. I refuse to let Chat GPT write my emails, but do understand the power in using AI in this way. Then, when I wanted to use Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to save some money and publish my new memoir myself (see a future blog), I went on YouTube to learn how to do it.

There was a comprehensive instructional video on YouTube, as there always is. But, it turns out KDP has a multitude of requirements to format a document in Word to fit KDP templates. I was doing it by hand in Word as per the video. It was taking hours. When I told Andrew of my tedium, he said, “let Claude do it.”

To make a long story short, I played around with Claude, the LLM AI Tool made by Anthropic. This is the company that refused to allow the use of this tool by the Department of Defense if the DoD would use it to surveille Americans or automate the decisions to use weaponry. This is wise because in war games, AI has launched nuclear weapons pretty much as depicted in the movie War Games from 1983 directed by John Badham.

Andrew said just click the plus sign in the lower left corner of the query box and attach your Word document and ask it to do what you want it to do—format for KDP Amazon publication.

So, I did that with my book manuscript.

Holy cow! Claude did it.

My learning curve was steep but I managed to completely format an e-book and a paperback according to KDP standards of size, font, and margins which are quite rigid using Claude. Headers and footers were added by Claude as soon as I asked for them. The Table of Contents was done automatically for me. Claude identified where the chapters began and ended. Claude added page numbers and headers automatically for the paperback. The chapters are hot linked in the e-book for fast navigation on a Kindle and automatically given the correct starting page numbers in the paperback version.

That was the easy part. Now I needed a front and back cover. I uploaded old photographs of me by first photographing the photographs using my iPhone and then transferred them to my computer. Claude constructed the covers, back and front. The hardest task in creating a KDP paperback is melding the front cover, spine, and back covers in one, continuous pdf file. It took me and Claude seven shots to get it right, but we did it. The key to all of this is learning how to prompt Claude so he is clear about what you want. You can even ask Claude “how should I prompt you to do X.”

This all took about 8 to 10 hours. The next time I need to do it (my next novel in the works), I should be able to do it in half the time.

If you have ever considered using these large language models in your work, do it. My son tells me that if you want a specific work product and you have an uploadable example of what you want it to look like, feed that to Claude and get out of the way. You will have yours in minutes.

Quite simply, there is no way I could have self-published the book without Claude. Now if I could only get him to caddie for me.