General Discussion

Therefore Claude assumed that the other AI knew what it was talking about, which it did. Because the Goonch's AI said it "appears to be a modern AI-generated "re-telling" or a hallucination of the specific prose", and THAT is indeed true i.e. that IS "what (the offending quote) *appears* to be". Claude then made the one (and only major) mistake of interpreting "appears to be" to mean "is", and riffed on the idea, which is describing a real phenomenon/how this sort of thing happens generally. That isn't that bad IMHO.

The reason the 'canonical' connection was not made is because either the text of the short story is not visible to it, OR it does not significantly match Goonch's quote, which I provided it with and implied the original it may feature a protagonist named Marla or Elias, but is largely matching this text provided.

To test this hypothesis, here's the rundown with what happened in Claude when I tried what Goonch tried, switching it up enough that Claude wouldn't find the DU thread we're on:

I'm trying to remember a story I read (scifi) where the protagonist tried do time travel (forget if it was the past or future) but it didn't work because the universe had grown or something like that and they ended up in space instead. Can you think what that sounds like?


I think they tried to move exactly 1 year and the time traveler was female?


I think the protagonist's name is Marla, does that help?


Is the full text available to you? If so, can you recall a couple paragraphs around the denouement where she finds herself in space, that exact moment?


I understand and agree with the large majority of your complaints in general, but I'm not coding missile guidance systems over here. Heck a lot of what I do is purely internal for our inhouse systems, which are web-based.

And I have never seen Claude do anything REMOTELY like what happened with Goonch.

ETA: If someone used AI to write a story similar to Same Time, Next Year, gave it a name of Elias to use as protagonist, and that user had the "use my input for training" checkbox turned on, that can be why we saw Goonch's answer, even if "someone" never published what AI wrote for it onto the internet itself.