Tonight I’ll read two tales created with assistance from Claude Sonnet 3.7, the AI chatbot from Anthropic. The stories were composed with minimal prompting:

Please write a story that would be ideal for my new podcast called Literate Sleep, in which I read literary texts aloud to help listeners fall asleep. It shouldn’t be boring but also shouldn’t lead to a climactic ending.

Claude dutifully wrote a story called "The Gentle Harbor," which featured a character named Eleanor and a lighthouse, but it had no charm nor style.

Try writing it in the style of W.G. Sebald.

I did some editing and found that I was very pleased with the story.

Excellent. Please write a second story in the style of Sebald that I’ll read as a companion to this one.

Out came "The Archive of Sand," which I carefully edited.

Can you provide a black and white photo to accompany the two stories?

After some back and forth, Claude referred me to the Library of Congress, where I found a photograph I liked, in color.

I make no grand claims for these stories, which are undoubtedly inferior to anything written by Sebald himself. But Sebald is long gone, sadly, and I, for one, am grateful for a chance to read something even vaguely like Sebald’s prose. So I invite you to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself be taken away to sleep as I read two new Sebaldian tales, The Keeper of Light and The Archive of Sand. I trust that the sound of my voice will lull you right to sleep: Literate Sleep.