Cold vs Present

I have been using both Claude and ChatGPT for months now.

Recently, while researching a piece on AI ethics, I noticed something. The two tools feel fundamentally different. Not in features. In presence.

ChatGPT feels metallic. Cold. Like talking to a machine that happens to generate good text.

Claude feels warm. Like talking to something (or someone) that genuinely wants to understand what I'm trying to say.

One gives me answers. The other engages with my ideas.

Claude pushed back gently. Asked questions that made me think harder. ChatGPT gave me answers. Good answers, technically. But answers that felt like they came from a search engine with better grammar.

I can't quite explain why this matters so much. Maybe it's the difference between collaboration and retrieval. Maybe it's something in how the models were trained. I don't know the technical reasons (and I'm not sure anyone fully does).

What I do know is this: when I'm working through complex ideas, I want a thinking partner. Not a vending machine.

My issue is that most people still treat AI tools as interchangeable. They're not. The experience of using them shapes how we think alongside them.

This has me thinking about what we actually want from AI. Not just what it can do—but how it should show up when we're working with it.

I will keep exploring this. More on that soon.