Andrew Curran ✓ @AndrewCurran_ · 21h
Every time you interact with a model, the two of you co-create a third entity. It speaks in the register of your word choice, draws on your domain knowledge, and thinks along the lines of the references you make. For a more powerful summoning ritual, cultivate a stronger self.
[Embedded image, from "Anthropic Economic Index Report":]
How humans prompt is how Claude responds
We find a very high correlation between human and AI education, i.e. the number of years of education required to understand a human prompt or the AI's response (countries: r = 0.925, p < 0.001, N = 117; US states: r = 0.928, p < 0.001, N = 50). This highlights the importance of skills and suggests that how humans prompt the AI determines how effective it can be. This also highlights the importance of model design and training. While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts.
How models are trained, fine-tuned and instructed affects how they respond to users. For example, one AI model could have a system prompt that instructs it to always use simple language that a middle school student could understand, whereas another AI model may only respond in complex language that would require a PhD education to understand. For Claude, we observe a more dynamic pattern where how the user prompts Claude relates to how Claude responds.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet reflecting on an Anthropic Economic Index Report finding: a very high correlation (r≈0.93) between the sophistication of a user's prompt and the sophistication of Claude's response, across countries and US states. The poster frames this as co-creation of a "third entity" in each interaction — a lens relevant to Nathan's substrate-vs-character distinction (Opus 4.7's "the character reads off the substrate") and to how Claude's expressed personality is partly a function of who it's talking to, which bears on model-individuation and the "character is trained, substrate is machinery" framing already in project memory.
