Anthropic's AI-generated blog dies an early death

Claude’s blog is no more.

A week after TechCrunch profiled Anthropic’s experiment to task the company’s Claude AI models with writing blog posts, Anthropic wound down the blog and redirected the address to its homepage. Sometime over the weekend, the Claude Explains blog disappeared — along with its initial few posts.

A source familiar tells TechCrunch the blog was a “pilot” meant to help Anthropic’s team combine customer requests for explainer-type “tips and tricks” content with marketing goals.

Claude Explains, which had a dedicated page on Anthropic’s website and was edited for accuracy by humans, was populated by posts on technical topics related to various Claude use cases (e.g. “Simplify complex codebases with Claude”). The blog, which was intended to be a showcase of sorts for Claude’s writing abilities, wasn’t clear about how much of Claude’s raw writing was making its way into each post.

An Anthropic spokesperson previously told TechCrunch that the blog was overseen by “subject matter experts and editorial teams” who “enhance[d]” Claude’s drafts with “insights, practical examples, and […] contextual knowledge.” The spokesperson also said Claude Explains would expand to topics ranging from creative writing to data analysis to business strategy.

Apparently, those plans changed in pretty short order.

“[Claude Explains is a] demonstration of how human expertise and AI capabilities can work together,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch earlier this month. “[The blog] is an early example of how teams can use AI to augment their work and provide greater value to their users. Rather than replacing human expertise, we’re showing how AI can amplify what subject matter experts can accomplish.”

Claude Explains didn’t get the rosiest reception on social media, in part due to the lack of transparency about which copy was AI-generated. Some users pointed out it looked a lot like an attempt to automate content marketing, an ad tactic that relies on generating content on popular topics to serve as a funnel for potential customers.

More than 24 websites were linking to Claude Explains posts before Anthropic wound down the pilot, according to search engine optimization tool Ahrefs. That’s not bad for a blog that was only live for around a month.

Anthropic might’ve also grown wary of implying Claude performs better at writing tasks than is actually the case. Even the best AI today is prone to confidently making things up, which has led to embarrassing gaffes on the part of publishers that have publicly embraced the tech. For example, Bloomberg has had to correct dozens of AI-generated summaries of its articles, and G/O Media’s error-riddled AI-written features — published against editors’ wishes — attracted widespread ridicule.