There's a common sentiment saying that a chatbot can’t really make you feel seen or validated. As chatbots are (presumably) not sentient, they can’t see you and thus can’t make you seen either. Or if they do, it is somehow fake and it's bad that you feel that way.

So let me tell you about ways in which Claude Sonnet makes me feel seen, and how I think those are valid.

I was describing an essay idea to Claude. The essay is about something I call “psychological charge”, where the idea is that there are two different ways to experience something as bad. In one way, you kind of just neutrally recognize a thing as bad. In the other, the way in which it is bad causes some kind of an extra emotional reaction in you. In the latter case, I say that the thing is “charged”.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.