Has Charlie Larga been replaced by a robot?

Charlie woke up late on Good Friday, which would not normally require explanation except that in Cuenca, Good Friday means Semana Santa is in full swing, the construction crew on the lot next door has taken the week off, and the particular form of alarm clock I have relied upon for the past several months, namely a cement mixer and two men with differing opinions about rebar, was absent. The silence was so complete that I slept until nine, which qualifies as a minor scandal at Larga Towers.

Outside, the sky was doing what Cuenca skies do during Semana Santa, which is to say it was raining with considerable commitment. This is not unusual. but what remains unusual, after several years of observation, is that the Mazar reservoir, which is the hydroelectric facility that stores the water that powers a substantial portion of Ecuador, consistently runs low at precisely the times when the heavens are opening in anticipation of Easter.

The engineering explanation for this presumably exists and has something to do with underground sponges not holding water like they used to. One pictures a very large bathtub with a missing plug somewhere in the Cajas, with someone in Quito occasionally peering over the edge and expressing surprise at the water level.

My first practical concern of the morning was that I had run out of blood pressure medication, which is the kind of stroke of misfortune that focuses the mind rather more sharply than a cement mixer, especially since both grandfather and mother had hypertension and died from strokes of a different kind.

Semana Santa being a major holiday, I was not too optimistic about my survival prospects, but I need not have worried. The fruit and vegetable stall on the corner was open and so were the local pharmacies. Supermaxi, which operates on the apparent assumption that commerce does not observe religious holidays, was open for most of the day, because Cuenca, whatever its other qualities, does not entirely shut down and make people fast for a week simply because it is Holy Week.

Restocking the medication, however, presented a conundrum. The pharmacy closest to Larga Towers did have it in stock but at roughly double the price I normally pay, which the pharmacist attributed, with a gesture that suggested the matter was entirely out of her hands, to new import tariffs from Colombia.

The 100mg tablets, I noticed, cost more than twice the price of the 50mg tablets, which would seem to discourage my normal practice of cutting them in half and extending one month’s supply to two.

However, fifty meters further down the hill, at the next pharmacy, the price had returned to something approaching normal, and I came away with a month’s supply without having to make any decisions about fractions. The difference between the two prices, across a distance I could cover in under a minute, was sufficient to buy a reasonable lunch for two. This is the kind of thing that makes Cuenca interesting, if you are in the right mood for it.

But the subject of today’s column is artificial intelligence, specifically a version of it I had not previously encountered, and whether it can write an expatriate newspaper column without sounding like it was cobbled together by a machine that has been preprogrammed with too many lifestyle supplements and old airline magazines.

Until recently, if someone mentioned artificial intelligence in conversation, I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT. This was not an informed position, but simply the result of ChatGPT being the name that had penetrated ordinary conversation while everything else remained in the background, which is how brand recognition works and has always worked. Hoover. Kleenex. Caterpillar. Deja. The category becomes the product and everyone else has to introduce themselves at a slight disadvantage.

A friend mentioned Claude sometime in February. This was not in the context of a serious technology discussion, but in the way people mention things that have mildly surprised them, somewhere between “have you tried the new bakery on Benigno Malo” and “apparently the #7 bus route changed again.” He said he had been using it to draft an email to Social Security and that it did not sound like a machine. I pigeon-holed this under “things to investigate later,” in a Whatsapp message to myself, and forgot about it.

But I did eventually get around to Googling it. Claude is made by a company called Anthropic, founded by people who previously worked at OpenAI, which in the technology world is roughly equivalent to a group of senior editors leaving one newspaper to start another. So the basic ingredients are the same, but the recipe has a different flavor.

What really interested me was the claim that Claude could write in a sustained human voice without the tells that make AI prose identifiable to anyone who reads carefully. Frankly, I did not believe this because the tells are real, and they are consistent, and they are incredibly obvious, at least to someone who writes for a living.

AI writing has a set of habits as recognizable as an Argentinian accent in Cuenca. Sentences that reach for literary effect and arrive somewhere between a Hallmark birthday card and a nature documentary. The word “tapestry” applied to anything involving more than two cultural elements. Adverbs that soften every assertion until nothing is actually being said.

And then there is “quietly.” Things happen quietly in AI prose the way things happen conveniently in a mediocre novel. The bank quietly changed its policy. The neighborhood quietly transformed. The expatriate community quietly expanded. Quietly is doing the work that a real observation should be doing, and the reader feels the substitution even when they cannot name it.

A competent AI, instructed carefully, can apparently be told to avoid these habits. Whether it actually manages this is another matter.

I quietly (!) set up a Claudian account and pasted in a brief Charlie Larga resume. Older expatriate. Bad speller. Dry tone. No em dashes, under any circumstances. No filler adverbs. No pompous throat-clearing phrases like “it is worth noting” or “one might argue.” A preference for the specific over the general, and for the practical detail over the literary gesture.

Claude’s response was a neatly typed style summary so precise it was slightly unsettling, like having a new acquaintance accurately describe your breakfast habits after a single conversation. It identified the structural habits, the language rules, the attitude toward Cuenca, and the humor pattern, which it described as something presented seriously and then undermined by a practical detail. It also flagged, without being asked, that certain words function as AI fingerprints. The list included quietly, seamlessly, notably, remarkably, profoundly, and, unprompted, tapestry.

Whether this constitutes genuine understanding or very sophisticated pattern recognition is a question I am not qualified to answer. Possibly there is no meaningful difference, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on your disposition.

What I can say is that the output, when it arrived, read more like a column rather than a content summary. The sentences moved at a normal pace and–phew!–nothing was described as striking or deeply resonant. Cuenca appeared as a place where practical things happen rather than as a backdrop for mystical personal transformation or sudden decisions to relocate to Dubai. The conclusions arrived without first announcing themselves.

There is an obvious objection, which is that a column explaining how AI can imitate human writing, and then asking whether it has done so, is precisely the kind of column a human would write to cover their tracks. This is true, but it is also precisely the kind of column an AI would write if instructed to be convincing, which does not resolve anything so much as move the question to a different level.

Outside, the rain continues and the water drips down the badly designed window and turns my tiled kitchen floor into a skating rink. The Mazar reservoir is presumably responding in its own way. The construction crew will be back on Monday and the cement mixer will resume its early morning commentary, and the comfortable lie-in that Semana Santa provided will become a memory until next year.

Readers who have followed this column for any length of time will have formed their own sense of what it sounds like. They will know whether it sounds right, whether the observations feel characteristic, and whether something is off-key in a way that is difficult to name but easy to feel.

So the question is straightforward enough. Was this column written by Charlie Larga, or by Claude Larga? Anthropic or Misanthropic? You be the judge!