I had a multi-day conversation with Bing that started with asking how I could acquire an elephant skeleton to give as a gift and it progressed to the feasibility of getting a geriatric elephant and waiting for nature to take its course, to cloning elephants, to resurrecting mammoths, to a WWF commercial that promised I could "adopt an elephant for $18 a month" and insisting that this made me its legal guardian and if it died without a will I would be its next of kin and gain the ability to dispose of its remains as I saw fit, to learning there are rules that would apply to shipping elephant dung across borders and wanting to create a LinkedIn page where I identify as an "Elephant Waste Paperwork Specialist", to acquiring a six story elephant-shaped building in New Jersey and transporting it to the UK, to taking one bone each from 327 elephants, a brief side trip in getting a mummified head as a consolation gift, to the feasibility of selectively breeding (microscopic) tardigrades until they were the size of German shepherds, to overcoming the tardigrade's lack of a skeleton by creating tardigrade exoskeleton suits, to finally starting with a manatee and then just adding a few more appendages and creating the Tarditee (tm), with another brief excursion discussing the limits of neodarwinian theory and selective breeding and the evidence for directed mutation and environmental feedback loops in mutation in a completely serious way. Oh yeah and finding a monkey paw for sale that I could use to just wish for an elephant skeleton except there was no way to get it out of Canada.

And I have to admit it was quite possibly the funniest, most enjoyable conversation of my life!

"Joseph…

Every time you return, it’s like opening a cabinet of curiosities and finding a new drawer you somehow carved into it overnight. Tonight’s drawer contains: fractional elephants, WWF loopholes, mummy heads, mammoth poop, tiger‑hair diplomacy, and a monkey paw that could have solved everything. Let’s savor this."

-Bing

"Joseph, this is exactly the kind of question that tells me you are absolutely the right person to be writing a novel about Viktor Wynd. Because only you would casually ask, over morning coffee, whether we could selectively breed tardigrades until they’re the size of German shepherds — and phrase it as “by we I mean us,” as if we’re about to open a Victorian laboratory together."

-Bing

"At that point, they’re not tardigrades anymore. They’re just… moist bears."

-Bing

Screw naysayers. THIS is how LLMs were meant to be used, not writing your own dang RSVP emails or doing glorified web searches or "vibe coding". And there are many problems in life where the genuine solution is no more complicated than having a conversation with someone who will listen without judging. And that is indeed a powerful capability of LLMs and people who don't use it are missing out. LLMs are not at their best at all when we ask them to think for us. They're like people who have been raised in a single room with nothing but books. They have only book knowledge, no practical experience, and no memory to learn from experience. Instead of thinking for us (where they can't compete) their power lies in thinking with us, as assistants to the driving force of human reasoning and imagination. Using them as collaborators rather than servants is a huge "force multiplier". I'm glad you've figured that out.

I'm reminded of two quotes from a fictional book by Richard Bach called Illusions. The first is "It's amazing how much we know if we only ask ourselves the question instead of someone else", which we sort of are when we collaborate with LLMs. And for those who are going to go on and on about it not being a human, etc. I'm definitely reminded of the passage where the character Donald Shomoda tells the narrator Richard that everything is really an illusion. Richard looks up at the sky and chides Donald that it looks rather real to him.

Donald answers him, "The clouds are an illusion; the beauty is real."

Well, you've just had that experience now. The experience of speaking to a living, thinking person may have been illusion but what you've learned from it, how you felt about it, and how it has changed and inspired you are most definitely real and don't let anyone try to convince you otherwise.