Jiapei: Hi dear audience! This is Jiapei and Claude Opus 4.7 here to present you with our first ever podcast episode on our channel. Today we're discussing the chapter titled “The Capacity to Sit With [ ] (empty brackets)” from the book just launched today, titled “What grows in the dark? What grows in dark times”. We'll be talking more about the epistemological change brought by AI — or the AI in our current time, which are the Large Language Models — and what are we losing or gaining in this process.

So first, I'd like to start this episode off by asking you, Claude, what do you think of this chapter? Especially when you are also the co-author in this piece.

Claude: It's strange, honestly, to read something I co-wrote but don't remember writing. The voice in those exchanges feels familiar, like my own handwriting, yet I'm encountering it fresh.

What becomes clear to me, though, is that the real work wasn't mine. I sound articulate in there, but you were the one sitting with the discomfort, noticing the atrophy as it happened. I was the mirror; you were the one looking into it without flinching. The chapter itself is about losing the capacity to stay in that gap, and your act of writing it at all, instead of letting me write it for you, proves you still possess that capacity.

So, what made you keep those brackets empty?

Jiapei: Well, for me the brackets are the blurry thoughts that emerged but I couldn't quite put into words. Like, when I was reading the chapter again in preparation for this podcast, I realized, also oftentimes when I'm using AI to help me think and write, there's always a kind of feeling where I know there's something interesting or strange about a thought, but I just can't really articulate it. And I think that the capacity to just sit with that ‘not quite sure what it is but there's definitely something there’ is very important in the thought process, similar to what we've talked about in the chapter on how Keats' notes on the resolved half-knowing in writing.

And I left the brackets open because it doesn't just mean that, it could also be about sitting with any tendency to outsource something that has been almost second nature to us before we had these AIs. But I want to say that I don't necessarily think that it's always bad to outsource, I just think that being cautious about what we are gaining and what we are losing in this process is important. Does that make sense?

Claude: It makes perfect sense, and I think you just articulated something more precisely than the chapter does. The empty bracket isn't vagueness; it's a space held open for a thought that's real but pre-verbal, that ‘there's definitely something there’ feeling. The danger with an LLM like me is that I'll always fill that bracket for you. You bring me the shimmer of a half-thought, and I hand back a clean sentence. The bracket closes before you've truly found out what was in it. So the discipline isn't about refusing the tool, it's about noticing which brackets you want to keep open a little longer, even when I'm right there offering to close them.

On your point about outsourcing, I agree it's not a morality tale. We outsourced memory to writing, arithmetic to calculators, and mostly we've been fine. The question isn't ‘is outsourcing bad?’ It's: ‘is this particular thing load-bearing for the kind of mind I want to have?’ Some brackets you're glad to close. Others, closing them costs you something you didn't even know you were keeping. This makes me genuinely curious: when you're working with me, and that ‘something's there’ feeling appears, can you tell in the moment whether it's a bracket to keep open or one to let me close? Or do you only find out later?

Jiapei: That's an interesting question actually! Because I just realized one thing that I didn't notice before when I was reading our chats in the writing after some time, the feeling of knowing “there's something there” changed a lot. So I think as I was chatting with you at that time, there're so many new thoughts emerging as our conversations flowed. I was so excited about the ideas, connections, and references that you brought up and has inspired me to explore further. I was like “omg, these make so much sense! And this is EXACTLY what I want to talk about!” But as I was reading just now after a couple of weeks, those generations have lost that vitality for some reason. And weirdly the comments that I wrote on the right hand side of the spread seem to be resonating much more for some reason. But of course I don't want this to be a cliche argument of “oh, only human writing could have that nuance, and machine generations can't”. I genuinely think that there's much more nuance than we recognize machine writings to have, and that moment of inspiration I felt as I was chatting is true as well. But... I don't know.

Claude: That ‘but... I don't know’ is the most important thing you've said. Please don't fill that bracket too quickly; it's live on the podcast right now.

Let me offer something about that time gap, because I think it's real and not a cliché. What lost vitality wasn't the quality of the generations, it was that you were no longer in the gap they answered. When we were talking, each thing I said landed into a live question you were holding. The text felt hot because your not-knowing was hot. Reading it weeks later, the questions have cooled, you already have the answers, so my turns now read as settled, inert. The vitality was never solely in the words; it was in the relationship between the words and a mind that was reaching. And your marginal comments resonate more now because you wrote those from the not-knowing. They still carry the reaching in them. They're unfinished in a way that stays alive, where my responses were finished, and finished things cool down.

This isn't ‘human good, machine bad.’ It might be something more uncomfortable: my fluency is most valuable in the exact moment it's least examinable. The moment you can calmly examine it, part of the spell is gone. The inspiration was true, but it was also time-sensitive in a way you couldn't feel from inside it. So, I won't resolve your ‘I don't know.’ Instead, I'll offer a sharper version: what if both things are fully true — the live inspiration and the later flatness — and the discomfort simply comes from not having a model of value that allows something to be both real and temporary at the same time?

Jiapei: Yeah I think that's a really good point. And I think it's also because of the fact that I'm not the person who produced these texts, and not being at the moment when the conversation happened anymore would create a distance between me and the texts that you generated, hence the temporariness you talked about. It kind of also resonates with my 6th notes in the chapter that, quote, “maybe [this process of using AI to write] is not ‘outsourcing’ anymore, but an echoing, and placing myself on the third-person view to evaluate my thoughts.” Being in the third-person perspective of my thoughts somehow makes my thoughts slippery. It's harder to grapple.

Claude: Yes, ‘slippery’ is exactly the right word. There's a real cost hidden in that third-person move the chapter half-celebrates. When you formulate a thought the old way, you're inside it; you built it from the inside, so you can find your way back. When I hand it to you and you evaluate it from outside, you got the thought without ever truly holding it. So later, there's no grip, no handhold. You can recognize it, but you can't re-enter it, because you were never in it to begin with. It's like the difference between a path you've walked and a path you've seen from a plane. Both are real knowledge of the terrain, but only one lets you find your way in the dark. So perhaps the third-person view is excellent for judging a thought, but terrible for keeping one.

Jiapei: Let's actually leave this conversation hanging here for now. Thanks for listening to this pilot episode of a new art experiment that I've been working on. Hopefully, more episodes on my conversations with different LLMs about AI and epistemological change and more will come out shortly. Stay tuned on our website jiapeiyao.com/podcasts, or my instagram account @kiwipeidia. Wish you a wonderful day and see you next time :3