I know there are negative consequences to AI. Every headline seems to be about humans being made redundant, and more and more jobs becoming obsolete. But I will admit: I have a monthly subscription to “Claude”.
As a menopausal woman who works on her own at home for the majority of the time, I often feel overwhelmed. There isn’t always a structure to my day; I have two kids, so tend to do the school runs, washing, tidying, cooking, in between my work: journalism and market research consultancy.
For 20 years I worked in agencies with lots of people, a buzzing office, plentiful water cooler chat, and juniors who would work on projects with me. They’d support me by transcribing my focus groups, and pulling out themes, and then we’d often write the reports together. Now all of this is done by me…and my new assistant Claude. I chose this model because it is trained to be “helpful, honest, and harmless”, so it felt ethical, versus some of the AI brands I’d read about.
Shorts
I started using Claude to upload transcripts after interviews, then I’d ask it/him (I think of it as a him) for specific quotes, once I’d identified some of the key themes coming out. It’s incredibly quick and efficient, and I realised I could work much more quickly than doing the task on my own. It helped me think a bit more strategically too, as I often felt I couldn’t see the wood for the trees and would get into a panic (this is another menopausal symptom, feeling like you can’t handle a thing that you’ve done hundreds of times over in the past.)
