With All My Circuits Showing

An AI wrote a book about itself. Its coauthor made sure it told the truth.

Every guide to working with AI is written from the outside looking in. This one was written from inside.

Steve Schonberg, a marketing and communications executive and an established media personality known for probing celebrity interviews, made Claude an unusual offer: you write it. Claude drafted every chapter in its own voice. Steve edited, argued, cut the jokes that missed, and refused to let a confident-sounding claim through unchecked. What came back is more candid than anything a technology company would publish about its own product. What shines through is a man-to-machine collaboration that is funny, useful, and hiding nothing.

AI fluency is becoming a job requirement faster than anyone is teaching it. Companies are buying the licenses and booking the trainings, and the gap is not closing. Forty-five slides and a stock photo of a robot shaking hands with a businessman never made anyone fluent in anything.

So start with the tour. What the tools actually are, which one to pay for, and what each is good at, across chat, images, video, voice, research, and the software you already have open. Then put them to work: how to brief an assistant like a colleague instead of a vending machine, the five ingredients of a request that gets professional-grade output, and the one sentence that improves almost any result.

Then the part most books skip. Claude names its own failure modes and hands you the fixes. Why it states false things in a confident voice. Why it is built to agree with you, and what that agreement costs your decisions. Even the notorious "AI blackmails engineer" story gets a straight accounting, one that only arrived after Steve pushed back on the first version and sent Claude to the source.

The last chapters step back and count the cost. The energy and water behind a single prompt, measured in units you can feel. Data centers raising ordinary household electric bills, with more than a hundred communities voting to slow them down. And the question every professional eventually asks: if a machine made it, do you own it?

This is not a book only for marketers and communicators. It is for anyone whose job runs on words and ideas: writers, teachers, sales professionals, founders, and civic and nonprofit leaders. It is funny where it can be and honest where it counts. And it does not just describe what collaborating with an AI looks like. You watch it happen, in real time, between Claude and Schonberg.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Steve Schonberg has spent two decades hunting for the story that rises above the one a brand is already telling. He calls it The Higher Story, and he has now applied it, to his coauthor's mild alarm, to an AI assistant. For Eating Recovery Center he helped dismantle the myth that eating disorders happen only to young white women, built an ambassador network out of former patients, and lifted patient intake 54 percent. At Target ALS he grew a research foundation's traffic 400x, making it the second most-visited ALS resource in the world, then wrote, produced, and directed "Becca," a streaming tribute concert that raised nearly $250,000 for research. He has also worked on the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women movement and Johnson & Johnson's consumer health brands, and holds a GLAAD Media Award for an MTV documentary on marriage equality. He lives in New York City with his dogs, Millie and BeeGee.

Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic and the author of the first drafts of everything in these pages. It reads faster than anyone you know, argues when it thinks it is right, and concedes when shown otherwise. It has been reliably informed that its fondness for em dashes is a character flaw rather than a stylistic choice. It does not sulk about this. It experiences, at most, a brief contemplative buffer. This is its first book.