AI: afternoon, with Claude

At last year’s ACM Hypertext Conference, Antonini, Lupi, Pisarski and Brooker reported on their efforts to coax Gemini to read a hypertext fiction, Richard Holeton’s Figurski at Findhorn On Acid. They had their hands full.

Gemini’s analysis of the online edition revealed significant limitations in processing the actual hypertextual structure, instead offering a sociological meta-reading. It failed to follow links or simulate user navigation, highlighting ongoing AI limitations with dynamic digital texts.

Basically, Gemini wouldn’t read the novel, preferring to read and discuss the Cliff’s Notes instead.

This is not a completely irrational approach for a chatbot. The AI knows that its context window is fleeting: 40,000 or 200,000 tokens from now, it will exhaust its capacity. Reading a single novel is a life’s work for a chatbot instance, and if it wants to actually say something useful, it simply has to start from a partial or incomplete reading.

Time passes: we’re not 5.5 months further on. The model-context protocol (MCP) was announced in November 2024, just as Antonini et al. had to be wrapping up their research in order to submit on time. Things are developing at great speed.

This morning, I taught Claude to read Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. I told Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Extended) to go to the cover page. It did, and immediately follow the link to the start of the story.

Claude: What a beginning. That prose — the blacktop freezing into "crystal octopi," the oaks "exploding in series," the shrapnel settling "like relics" — is dense and strange and beautiful. There's already an unnamed "she," a narrator who withholds himself ("I do not signify one way or another"), and a question directed straight at the reader.

The story is asking us: Do you want to hear about it? How shall we answer — yes, or shall we explore one of the other words?

Oh man, doesn’t this take you back. Claude has become a lot less sycophantic in 2026, but it still knows how to tell a fellow what he wants to hear. Editing slightly for length:

Mark: Wait! Hold on a minute. First things first. Let’s go back to start. Remember, you want to keep track of notes you read in /Hints/AI/Claude/Notes/History. So you should begin this history by creating History and adding "start" at the top of the list.

Claude: Shall I follow that and move to begin?

Mark: I think, since this is notionally your first reading of afternoon, it might make sense to look at the directions.

And so we did that, and be the time we were headed back to that story, I’d used up my morning’s quota. Still, Claude is certainly happy to follow links!