I read about Ethan Mollick’s experiment testing Claude’s recent model, Fable 5.2, so I thought I’d give it a try since we are able to test it on a Pro account, which I have, and Claude is offering two free refreshes. The article I read did not include Ethan’s entire prompt so I chose Fable 5.2 in Cowork, set on high, and prompted it as follows:
Build the most impressive thing you can for my blog https://educatoral.com/wordpress/
That was all I read about Ethan’s prompt so that was all I typed into Claude. Here’s what I got: (Click here) Twenty years of reflecting, sharing and learning. The blog went live on July 13, 2006. Every dot below is one post. Search all of them at once or follow a single idea across two decades.
I thought it was nice, but not impressive by any means. Surely not what I expected after so much hype about this new Fable model. That being said, I did appreciate the screenshot above showing the 20 year history of my blogging and showing the peak topics from my journey with iPads, to gamification, to Minecraft, to my current journey with AI in the Classroom.
So, I asked for a bit more:
Can you make an animated resource to go with the html file you made? Something using artifacts to make an amazing video about my blog journey?
It made this:
And I had to add the music myself. I got music from YouTube’s editing feature. Again, nice, but not impressive.
I went looking for Ethan’s post and found it here: Fable 5.2 and Jagged AGI, General, often expert, and sometimes jagged. His actual prompt was way more substantial:
“I write OneUsefulThing among other stuff, I need you to create the most impressive thing I can share with people when you launch. It needs to be embeddable in a post and i can preface it however you like. it needs to have a visceral impact on people to show what you can do and the range of capabilities. It should grab them quickly. Be amazingly clever about this.“
Maybe that’s why my output was good but not impressive so I re-wrote my prompt to match his:
I write Mr. Gonzalez’s Classroom, A blog to reflect, share and learn, https://educatoral.com/wordpress/. I need you to create the most impressive thing I can share with people when you launch. It needs to be embeddable in a post and I can preface it however you like. It needs to have a visceral impact on people to show what you can do and the range of capabilities. It should grab them quickly. Be amazingly clever about this.
I reached my Fable 5.2 limit in under 10 minutes of this second prompt, so I used my free Fable 5.2 reset to have it finish. With the reset it was able to finish about 20 to 30 minutes later.
Here’s the Permission to Come Aboard webpage.
Okay, I am much more impressed with this second version. It just goes to show me again how important prompting is or at least what a difference a less detailed, brief prompt gets in comparison to a more nuanced prompt. Finishing this second job ate up 33% of my current session after using the free Fable 5.2 reset!
The interactive experience of the highlights of my career as expressed in my last 20 years of blogging is a great way for me to share with others what my teaching experience is right now. That is more like it, Fable 5.2.
