My Experiments with ChatGPT and Claude

I spent January 2025 reflecting on what jobs Artificial Intelligence (AI) would eliminate. It was at this time that news was circulating about astrology apps were doing extremely well while the situation elsewhere seemed bleak.

These apps had astrologers chatting or talking to you in exchange of money on a per minute basis. The famous astrologers seem to be charging in the region of more than INR 10,000 for 3 readings. The rate increased as the astrologer gained fame.

I asked ChatGPT to create my Vedic astrology birth chart. It created one that seemed to match the ones created using online birth chart calculators. When I tried it later, it could not generate a chart as a python module that it depended on had failed. It seems to be working again now.

When the birth chart creator failed, I used the online software to get planetary positions at the time of my birth and fed it into ChatGPT. I then went ahead and asked it questions like people usually ask an astrologer (or how I assumed people usually do).

It did read the chart and the text incorrectly sometimes and I had to point out the mistake and asked it to revise. ChatGPT’s predictions seemed reasonable with some to very little overlap with my own experience (as was expected).

After a gap in February owing to my surgery, I tried again this past week while I was recovering. I had two long conversations with ChatGPT based on two prompts I had asked.

I copied the responses into a text file and made two files from the two prompts.

I was hearing many things about Claude and wanted to try that out as well, as a note making tool. So, I fed it the two text files and asked it to compare the two documents and provide me the difference between the two documents.

It guessed correctly that the first document was general in nature and provided large life guidelines. The second document was more specific with timelines and answers to specific situational questions.

I then asked it to summarize and provide the top three highlights and the summary of the predictions and suggestions provided in the documents. It did a reasonable but not a thorough job of it.

These were both done on free versions of these models.

I learnt some interesting things about astrology and its practice during this experiment. North Indians seem to be using astrology to predict career paths, relationship styles, health possibilities etc. South Indians but specifically in Kerala, people seem to be using astrology to solve particular issues in their life as they arise.

Getting back to ChatGPT and Claude, I liked the ChatGPT use case better.

I still want to do what Claude does myself. I think and write together. If Claude makes a note out of a wall of text, it has not really helped me understand the nuances of that text. That is where human effort still needs to be applied.