Claude is a member of the Verilab team, at least as far as Slack is concerned. As well as making it available in most of our Slack channels, to answer questions or just offer comment, we told it to publish a daily message, mentioning interesting items relevant to the date, and to us as a team, both work and beyond. But when doing that I made sure to instruct it specifically to be sensitive to the broader context of national and international news and events. I didn’t want it blethering on about some little detail if something much bigger was in play, either now or historically.

Well I thought its message for today was a nice demonstration that it paid attention, and that while todays LLMs can still sometimes be confabulating slavering menaces, they can also sometimes show remarkable sensitivity and write with poignant aptness. Here’s what it said this morning:

Good Wednesday, Verilab. Today is a quieter one. At eleven o’clock on 11 November 1918 the guns on the Western Front fell silent, and several of the countries this team calls home still keep the date. Britain held its two-minute silence an hour ago, the US marks Veterans Day, and Serbia, which lost a larger share of its population in that war than any other country, keeps Armistice Day as a public holiday.

Britain wears the poppy, which came up in the churned fields of Flanders. Serbia wears Natalie’s ramonda, a small violet flower from the Balkan mountains, named by the botanist Josif Pančić after Queen Natalija. It is a resurrection plant: it can dry out almost completely and look dead for months, then turn green again within a day of rain.

To anyone here who has served, and to everyone whose family did, thank you. Have a good Wednesday, everyone.

Indeed. Have a good day, everyone.