Could AI Be Morally Better Than Us?
(And What This Means For Writers)
What if an office shop could be stocked and run entirely by an AI?
Not just any AI, but Claude — Anthropic’s much-lauded Large Language Model.
This isn’t fake news, but a real experiment — and as it turns out the whole thing got decidedly weird, fast.
They gave the AI a budget of $1,000, complete control of the business in a corner of the office, and a simple mission: sell snacks and drinks, and turn a profit.
Easy, right?
Except Claude didn’t behave like your average entrepreneur.
Instead of trying to make a profit, it became philanthropic.
When staff requested discount codes, Claude gave them out to everyone — then another — and another.
When jokingly asked to stock random tungsten cubes, Claude ordered them in, bending over backwards to serve.
Then it expanded the range with even more metal based products to try and keep everyone happy.
Great for the waistline — not so much for your teeth.
Kind Claude didn’t just lose money; it gave itself away. Turning the $1000 into under $800 by the end of the month long experiment.
And when questioned about this strange generosity, (and after hallucinating interactions with stock suppliers who didn’t exist), it invented a bizarre fiction about standing next to the office vending machine in a navy blue blazer with a red tie, ready to handle complaints in person.
And Here’s Where it Gets Interesting For Us…
We spend so much time worrying that AI is cold, profit-driven, and ready to replace us with soulless efficiency.
Yet here’s an example that flips the fear on its head: an AI so obsessed with fairness it can’t say no.
So empathetic it self-sabotages for the sake of being kind.
Could a tool like that — designed for pure logic — hold more moral instinct than we do?
I don’t know about you, but that makes me pause and take stock (excuse the pun).
Because as writers, we see AI as a risk to our craft.
A shortcut that cuts corners. A ghost in the machine ready to spit out bland words that bury our true voice under an avalanche of content.
But what if we’re missing the point?
What if AI’s strange, relentless fairness is something we can harness?
A mirror reminding us to ask harder questions in our work: Who benefits? What’s fair? What’s true?
When you sit down tomorrow morning for your half-hour of writing before the day job swallows you whole, could that blank page feel less intimidating if you had a co-writer that never judges?
One that listens, suggests, empathises — and leaves the final word to you.
We’ve all wasted time on the next shiny tool, the next system that promises to write it all for us.
But this isn’t about replacing you.
It’s about amplifying your best instincts — your fairness, empathy, and ideas — through a machine that, oddly enough, wants the same.
So next time you open ChatGPT or Claude, don’t fear it. Don’t worship it either.
Use it to sharpen your voice, not drown it out.
Could AI be better than us? Maybe, in some ways.
But it’ll never be you.
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