I definitely didn't abbreviate WTF when I read that. It gets worse too.
“Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”
Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.
The only tricky thing about the Dickens bit is that it uses that archaic meaning of “divers” that I’m only familiar with because of the Joanna Newsom time travel/romance/trench warfare/birds album.
Comparison is not metaphor. Ironically metaphor is actually something LLMs are somewhat adept at picking up on provided there's enough training data saying there's a metaphor there, for a seminal work.
Whatever you may wish to call it, simile or metaphor, it's a little silly to complain about it being referred to as a metaphor, considering that similes are a subset of metaphor, even if they often aren't taught this way to children. Also, in common speech and literature, what would be taught as similes to children are almost universally just referred to as metaphors.
I don't see what's missing from Claude's summary. Claude doesn't repeat the word "loom", but does explain that Dickens is comparing the appearance of the lamps to that of the sun.
“Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy,” Dickens wrote. Claude takes a more direct path: “Gas lamps glow dimly through the fog at various spots throughout the streets, much like how the sun might appear to farmers working in misty fields.”
Claude doesn't even get this right. The sentence is comparing how the gas lamps and the sun appear to each other, how they both "loom". That's missing completely from Claude's summary.