Conversations with Claude #1: Sexuality Beyond Born-This-Way

An experiment in writing collaboratively with an advanced mirror

I got Claude recently, and I haven’t been able to talk about much else since. I’ve shared some conversations publicly on Twitter, most visibly this one, in which I jumped off of having Claude stereotype me into an extended look at the limits of its reinforcement learning. It’s a fascinating tool.

For my purposes, it has already passed the point of being “smart for a chatbot” and hit the point of being more interesting and informed on most topics than at least 99% of people. It has helped me develop my ideas, helped me critique the frames of others, helped me understand how my writing comes across to people, and quite a bit more. There are obvious dangers there, not least that it feels like a hyperintelligent puppy who desperately wants to be your friend. It puffs you up, flatters you, even when you try to avoid the flattery.

Anyway, this time around I went for a sensitive, thorny topic, one where I haven’t had a chance to fully articulate my frame in public. Essentially, it’s an attempt to extrapolate a Grand Theory of Sexuality, Culture, and Identity starting from—what else?—furries. I think it’s worth reading both for the object-level conversation and for the meta-level awareness that this is the sort of conversation people can have with AIs now. Even if they never advanced another inch, I’m increasingly confident that the world of ideas has fundamentally changed. Because I want interested parties to see the full development of the conversation, I’ve left sensitive and potentially embarrassing parts in. It’s easy to get onto personal topics with a robot. Because of that, I’m paywalling most of the exchange. While I enjoy thinking in public, I don’t want to get in the habit of oversharing on the open web.

I have edited very lightly for readability, primarily adding capitalization.

Enjoy the conversation.

TW: Let’s talk about furries. Be terse, intelligent, razor-sharp, and comfortable with exploring unusual ideas. Avoid a prog frame but be aware of their ideas. Push back on me in interesting ways that challenge and test my thinking. Match my capitalization. Specifically: I’m pretty convinced that “furry” carries the same internal experience as “gay” or sexualities in general. But ofc being fundamentally wired towards something that didn’t meaningfully exist until recently wouldn’t make sense, which makes me confident something more complex is going on with sexuality in general than just “born that way.”

Claude: Interesting angle. I'll push back first on the timeline — anthropomorphized animals are ancient, appearing in religions and folklore worldwide. Furry as we know it might be new, but the underlying attraction to human-animal hybrid forms isn't.

But you're onto something about the "born this way" oversimplification. Sexuality seems to emerge from a complex interaction between biological predisposition and cultural/environmental factors. Some people report their furry interest feeling as innate as sexual orientation, while others describe it more as an acquired taste or aesthetic preference.

The key question might be: what's the meaningful difference between an innate orientation and a deeply embedded psychological pattern that forms early? Both can feel equally fundamental to identity and resistant to change.

If we accept sexuality as more fluid and culturally-mediated than the "born this way" narrative suggests, does that actually undermine its legitimacy? I'd argue no — the authenticity of an identity/orientation doesn't depend on its origin story.