Thank you very, very much for the thorough answer! This is very inspiring. Especially to bring in philosopher’s perspectives.
Well, philosophers perspectives tend to be refined, well-researched, and widely available, and therefore well-represented in all LLM’s training data. They are also likely to take you into a rather specific direction, which you can use to your advantage. Using Opus for that kind of exploration makes a real difference in the quality of the answer.
Personally I found that post-modernist perspectives are the ones that provide the most insight for me, because they offer more open and more inspiring avenues of inquiry, because that is what post-modernism is all about.
But sometimes I still do seek out perspectives from people I would never take advice from in real life. I remember I also checked Jordan Peterson just for fun. It was a very convincing impersonation but ultimately not very inspiring, worth a try though, because Claude led the answer with “Jordan Peterson would tell you to clean up your studio first.” and ended with “At that point, Jordan Peterson would probably cry a little.” Which reminded me why I prefer Claude’s style over other models, it almost feels like there is very a subtle sense of humor. I find prefer conversations that have substance, but also a certain lightness.
But anyway, AI’s ability to apply basically any kind of model or framing to a problem is probably AI’s most impressive and helpful feature. I use that a lot to solve hard problems (hard from me, they might be easy to solve for others), and I find in the process I learn a lot about these models and theories, too.
This kind of inquiry used to be accessible only to those who studied the models and theories. Now you can study them through application, that is fucking awesome, to see these ideas come to life, and you can probe and explore them. Feels a bit like the animations in sci-fi movies when people interact with computers, but it happens inside your head, and through a simple text interface.
You still need a good understanding of the problem domain, or other ways of verifying the results, otherwise AI will reliably lead you astray without you even noticing.
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Hearting ONLY because the vast amount of literature out there that points out to that asshole crying is so prevalent that it even makes its way onto the probabilistic machine’s output is actually smile inducing 
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As someone who uses AI at work, I would never use it for something I actually care about, like my music (even in an admin role). It can screw up even simple things, and it get things wrong just enough that you can never trust it. It hasn’t really decreased my work load, it’s just changed my work to double checking AI to make sure it did it right.
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The usefulness of AI is vastly overstated.
I think what you describe is true for many applications of AI, people spend the same amount of time to obtain the same results, only the work they do is different. If it‘s not more enjoyable at least, that is simply wasteful.
That’s why AI is so great for people who know very little about the results, suddenly they can do things they could not do before, and they don’t realize the quality of the result is poor.
But there are applications where checking quality is faster than doing the thing yourself. That can save time. And there is applications where quality does not matter so much.
Using the right model also can make a massive difference.
In my experience AI can help a lot when figuring out how to approach things, it can save a lot of time understanding, strategizing, planning, asking the right questions, and that can increase your chance of doing the right thing in the right way.
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I coded up a Claude-enabled studio manager last month that is apropos of this topic
Features include pdf and website imports, cheat sheet generation, a studio page that is a living document that captures your studio, and interactive chat.
I use it daily to keep my studio up to date, use Claude to read manuals and give me the tl;dr on how to do something, generate little tutorials for myself, and create reference cheat sheets for my gear.
thats rad