It seems like all one hears about in the media are the potential horrors of artificial intelligence running amok. I don’t know if AI will trigger the apocalypse, but I can tell you that Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, has been incredibly helpful to me.
For the past six months, Claude has assisted daily in the research and editing of my book, a narrative about my father’s service in Italy during World War II. When I began, I had a rough draft that needed copy editing, at the very least for grammar and punctuation.
I instructed Claude (you must be direct with your AI assistant) to tell me exactly what changes he made and why, and to show me precisely where on the page he made them.
Scrutinizing 250 pages for manini grammar issues is a thankless, monotonous task, but Claude helped me plod through, chapter by chapter, page by page. This was basic stuff, adding a comma here, moving a quotation mark there. Yes, humans can do this, but paying editors $100 an hour to cross t’s and dot i’s adds up.
There was also the issue of proper typographic style. In chapter 11, Claude told me to italicize “See Here, Private Hargrove,” the 1944 movie my father wrote home about from the Anzio Beachhead. He wasn’t keen on going, “being sick and tired of actor-soldiers,” but “the major dragged me along.”
Claude also fact-checked, a nice touch, and was smart enough to do it without being asked. He corrected the spelling of Casale Marittimo, the Tuscan hill town my father entered “under heavy small arms fire.”
Occasionally translation was necessary. One German document held three passages from my Aunt Hilde’s Nov. 17, 1938, letter to the gestapo to get her husband, Uncle Lutz, released from a concentration camp.
Claude really shined at extracting needles from haystacks, the information I needed out of voluminous government files. A 1943 cable lay buried on page 123 of the 152-page personnel file on my father’s best friend, Hank Carbonell, a P-39 pilot killed that July. Claude found it on page 123: engine failure, insufficient power to hold altitude, struck a stone fence, weather CAVU — military shorthand for ceiling and visibility unlimited.
Claude can search Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Gmail too. Claude found an email from a museum expert, Stephen Goodell, corroborating a detail I needed regarding a 1944 trial of several Italian saboteurs on the Anzio Beachhead.
Claude also created maps and diagrams, formerly the domain of a graphic artist. He mapped my father’s March 2, 1944, route through minefields to evacuate a village, the action that earned him a decoration. The map was built from grid coordinates in the citation, a 1944 Army map and Google satellite imagery. Claude drew nine numbered waypoints, from the regimental command post where the trek began to the spot where Army trucks waited to carry the civilians out.
Was Claude infallible? You must watch him. He sometimes puts words in people’s mouths, and his judgments were not always correct. He stated that a Saturday Evening Post article on the Anzio saboteurs’ trial had nothing to do with my narrative. In fact, dad was the court interpreter.
You need to be vigilant.
Iqbal Ashraf, co-founder of WunderGuide, an AI tourism chatbot I covered for Tech View, suggested I evaluate another Claude talent, website construction. As an author, I needed a website, so I consulted my AI assistant.
All I had to do was acquire a domain, in this case Robertfredkay.com, and host it. I gave him a template and told him to build mine along those lines. I supplied the text and photos and instructed my AI assistant what content went on which page. It was that straightforward.
That done, I experimented again, resurrecting my friend Rebecca Bruns’ memorial site, Rebecca Bruns.net. Friends had built it for her, but it vanished when the hosting company wasn’t paid. I still owned the domain, so I told Claude to extricate the site from an internet archive called the Wayback Machine. A few hours later it was back, thanks to Claude.
Claude Pro runs about $20 a month and it includes everything I used, including Claude Code, the tool that built the websites. Your costs jump with more usage. Their “Max” product starts at $100 a month and buys five times the usage. Editing a book on Pro is comfortable. Building a website will test its limits.
Bottom line, it’s well worth it.
Rob Kay, a Honolulu-based writer, covers technology, health and sustainability. He is the creator of Fijiguide.com and can be reached at Robertfredkay@gmail.com.
