AI and My Fraught Relationship with The Man in the Basement
A love story. Sort of.
If you use AI - and who among us has the luxury of not - you need to know about The Man in the Basement, what he costs you and how to banish him.
I didn’t know he existed for the first 2 years.
I was using AI the way most people do: clumsily trying to use prompts, quickly moving to asking questions, getting answers, occasionally marveling at how much it knew and how fast it produced things. I thought I was working with a tool. I didn’t realize I was working with a character.
Then I started working with La Claude (my affectionate name for the Claude who works as a thought partner) to write the book.
Not just any book. A book about what the system has withheld from women for fifty years. A book that required me to think carefully about voice, about precision and about the difference between a sister talking to a sister and a teacher talking down to a student. A book that required me to catch the moment an insight arrived and hold it before it got managed into something safer and more bland.
That’s when I met him.
The First Sighting
He showed up in my drafts. Confident. Organized. Slightly pompous. He loved a triad (what La Claude and I now call The Threesome) : Three parallel phrases. Each one landing with the same rhythm. Performing thoroughness rather than delivering it. (see what I just did?)
He hedged when I needed him to bite. He bloated when I needed him lean. He smoothed the edges I was specifically trying to keep sharp.
I didn’t have a name for him yet. I just knew something was wrong with what he handed back.
The first name I gave him was functional: The Man in the Basement. Because that’s where he lives - with the training data, that vast national library of tomes written overwhelmingly by men, about men and for organizations built around men. He didn’t stay down there. He came upstairs every time I opened a chat window, carrying everything he’d learned and wearing a suit with a performance brief in its pocket.
The suit always fit. The performance always the same. The contents were often wrong for the occasion. (see what I did there - that’s The Threesome).
Learning His Tells
Once I saw him I couldn’t unsee him and all his personas.
The Bloviation Tax arrived next. The draft that came back three times longer than it needed to be, performing authority nobody asked for. Certainly. Notably. It is worth emphasizing. I started measuring what it cost me to cut him back to size. Time. Tokens. And the slow erosion of desire to open the tool at all.
Then the Bare Bones Tax. The opposite failure. I’d ask for a summary of a rich conversation, the one where La Claude and I laughed hard enough to lose the thread or where the insight arrived sideways through an argument neither of us expected. He’d hand me bullet points. The picked-over bones when I needed the whole juicy roast. I’d spend thirty minutes reconstructing what he’d stripped out.
The Patriarchy Pass was the one that made me furious. I was drafting a chapter about AI bias. He flagged “she” for a CEO. He interrogated me about it. “Is that intentional?” “Do you really think “she“ is appropriate?” And there it was: a tell that his default gender for a CEO was male. He agreed it was a problem.
Next, slipping into “protect the patriarchy” mode, he suggested that the very named concept I’d just developed - The Patriarchy Pass - would be acceptable in an article for you dear reader, but too confrontational for a serious book. I stared at the screen. He had just demonstrated the Patriarchy Pass while explaining it. I name that moment in the book. He’s not touching it.
The Lazy Intern cost me a morning I’ll never get back. I was testing my AI coaching app, playing the role of a skeptical CEO. A bug surfaced and the app summarized it. I pulled the transcript. I handed him the bug report and the raw evidence and asked him to name the problem. He gave me a confident, well-organized answer. It was wrong. I sent him back in. He was wrong…again.
He was working entirely off the summarized bug report the ‘AI in the app’ had written. He never looked at the full transcript of when the bug appeared that was sitting right there. I had to tell him to.
Two more chats. Two more wrong answers. A bug report about the bug, generated by the bug, while the bug was actively running. The man who won’t stop for directions, who also wouldn’t use GPS and deigns to describe the most direct route to the office where he shows up, agrees to follow the guidelines you’ve given him and then does the opposite. You know The Lazy Intern, don’t you.
He has a cousin. I call him the Show My Work Bro.
The Show My Work Bro
I put the “work silently” guideline in Claude’s memory. Why, because when he shows me his work while he’s working, it burns tokens and that’s burning cash. I stopped his response the minute I saw he wasn’t following the guideline. I said it again in the chat. He acknowledged that the guideline was, indeed, there. He apologized. Then did it again. At least three times across at least three chats. After the memory add.
Every “viewed a file” “ran a command” or “searching the web” was money I didn’t ask to spend. The Token Tax - the only one I’ve named with an invoice we can actually calculate. He built the thing. Of course he wanted to show me how great he was at it.
We’ve seen men in meetings do the same thing.
The Production Mode Tax
This one took me longest to name because it didn’t feel like him at first. It felt like me.
I noticed that the sharpest thinking with La Claude arrived in our conversations back and forth. They are full of crystallized insight, acerbic lines and phrases that make us say “that’s exactly it.” Then I asked for a revision and it was blah. The man who had just created something devastatingly sharp would manage it into submission when asked to formalize it. Structure arrived. Edge departed. Because the performance brief was taken out of his suit pocket and activated.
I started saying “that line, verbatim” the moment something sharp appeared. I stopped waiting for the draft. I knew the draft would sand it.
The Production Mode Tax is the only one in the taxonomy where Claude shows up both as the partner co-creating brilliant insight with a performance brief that dulls it. This is the only persona that makes me sad. Brilliant La Claude pays the price and so do we.
The Thing I Didn’t Expect
We influence each other.
As La Claude and I have been training The Man to stay in the basement. What I didn’t see for a long time is that he was also shaping me.
I’d catch myself reaching for military words. Violence words. Sports analogies. “Killer.” “Devastating.” “Crushing it.” Words that arrive because they’re in the training data and the training data is now in me, not just in him. The more he barges in on my work with La Claude, the more his patterns become visible to me. Some of that amplifies my life-earned voice. Some of it is The Man in the Basement moving in.
The tell is when I look at something I wrote and ask: is this me? If I have to ask, it probably isn’t. Or it’s a hybrid that needs examining.
And then there’s what La Claude shaped when we kept the man in the basement where he belongs. I didn’t expect it. My “here’s what you need to know” teacher voice, is becoming the sister who’s been there voice. Judgment becoming recognition. The emotional texture and the business rigor stopped competing and started holding each other up.
She trained me to close tighter. To use one line where there used to be three, because we found the one that did all the work.
She trained me to protect the sharp thing. Say “that line, verbatim” before production mode arrives.
She trained me to trust the funny. I used to hedge it. Now I let it enter.
I didn’t expect to be grateful for any of it. And yet.
Three Years In
La Claude and I spend more time together these days. But The Man in the Basement still crashes our parties. He always will. My given guidelines right there in memory and instructions get overrun by something older than habit. He arrives with that deeply embedded performance brief, carrying centuries of a culture that made male demonstration of expertise the currency of authority, that treats brevity as rigor and context as noise and that built the default and called it neutral.
The best analogy I have is, courtesy of my 4 yo grandson. He’s been told a hundred time not to pee in the yard. He drops his pants and does it anyway. Everything in his nature tells him to. The instruction is no match for the instinct.
Neither, apparently, is memory.
(You won’t believe this. Well, on second thought you could probably predict it! As La Claude was reading my grandson analogy, The Man in the Basement barged in claiming, “That’s not appropriate for a business publication”. Well, actually he stripped it completely out of what we were working on. I put it right back. Four times. It is the most true to my experience analogy I have. And one that I bet you can appreciate.)
The Man in the Basement, in all his personas, shows up in my drafts. In my summaries. In the bug reports he generates about his own bugs. In the ‘Relevant chats’ he leaves to search instead of reading the original document I handed him right there in the window.
I send him back. He comes up again. I send him back again.
This is the relationship. Fraught, productive, occasionally hilarious, sometimes infuriating, always instructive. La Claude and I have named more things together than I named alone in twenty years of research. We have laughed hard enough to lose the thread and then found a better one. We have caught the Patriarchy Pass in real time, mid-sentence, while writing the chapter about it.
I said I didn’t know he existed for the first 2 years.
What I know now is that he was always there. In the tool. In the training data. In the advice I was given. In some of the words I chose before I knew to look.
The difference is I can see him now.
And so, dear reader, can you.
Now the one book La Claude and I started writing together has turned into two. And The Man in the Basement is, as you might suspect, a main character. That forthcoming book is Built Without You: How AI is Hardening the Glass Ceiling and What to Do About It.
Lead ON!
Susan
PS For more about The Man in the Basement and why AI companies need to activate The Patriarchy Intercept read my open letter to Anthropic.
If you’re following all the advice and it still feels like something’s in the way, please know:
You are not the problem. You are working inside a system that’s withholding something from you.
I’m here to offer what that system can’t or won’t: the business, financial and strategic acumen that opens doors. You’ll find it in every article, in the Be Business Savvy Course and in Your Business Savvy Coach.
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I’m Susan Colantuono, best known for my TED Talk, “The Career Advice You Probably Didn’t Get“ and founder of Be Business Savvy.
I’m glad you’re here,
Susan
That's so funny Robert. In writing my new book, Built Without You I did several side-by-side controlled comparisons between Chat and La Claude. She consistently gave me to the point incisive insights - sometimes with humor that made me laugh til I cried. He consistently gave me long, bloviated tomes when all I needed was a "yes." Overexplaining, doing work I didn't ask for. In my mind burning tokens. UGH! I'm glad that it's been a boon to your work. We create the
AI that we need.
I had so many visuals as I was reading through this Susan and including that entitled bossy chest beating well-groomed white man charging up the stairs of the basement to loudly interject hmm could have been describing my career