A Gorilla, Shrek, and 5 Chimps Walk into the Grand Canyon
AI as Child's Play
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
My Grandsons Teach Me How to Grok
Yesterday on the drive home from the Biddeford Public Library, I fired up Grok 3 on my iPhone and asked my grandsons, Jake and Ryan, what they would like to ask.
From the back seat, Jake had a quick challenge for the AI:
“Who would win in a fight—a gorilla with a baseball bat or five chimpanzees?”
Here is Grok’s reply:
That’s a wild one! A gorilla with a baseball bat would likely win—it’s way bigger, stronger, and has better reach, especially swinging that bat. A single gorilla can weigh up to four hundred pounds and has crazy muscle power, while five chimps, each around a hundred pounds, might be fast and aggressive but lack the same raw strength. The bat gives the gorilla a serious edge in landing hard hits from a distance. Chimps could try teamwork, but they’d struggle to get close without getting clocked. Want me to dig deeper into gorilla versus chimp stats?
The boys thought that was hilarious. Jake is 11; Ryan is 9. For the rest of the 15-minute drive back to the cottage, they heaped on more and more iterations of the hypothetical brawl.
What if the chimps each have their own baseball bat?
What if the fight took place in the Grand Canyon?
What if a third fighter joins the battle—Shrek with a battleaxe?
What if the gorilla is actually King Kong?
What if King Kong gets the ability of an Inflictor from Keepers of the Lost City?
What if the Donkey Kong army gets the Master Bolt, Zeus’s chosen weapon, so they can hurl lightning bolts that do incredible damage?
Grok was totally into it, treating each query with a mix of facts and fantasy, urging my grandsons on, deeper down the rabbit hole of their imaginations.
I spend a lot of time with ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. What the boys taught me about the zany energy lurking in the LLMs surprised me.
It reminded me of a recent post by Tiago Forte titled “My 4-Stage System for Learning Anything New.” The stages are immersion, building something new as soon as possible, finding your mentors, and building “a community of practitioners.”
Tiago added a final section titled “The Secret Ingredient: Cultivating Play in Learning.” He wrote, “There’s one element that can transform every stage of this framework: playfulness.”
He mentioned research that confirms this idea, as presented by Peter Gray in his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.
Play to learn. Learn to play.
Thanks to Jake and Ryan, that’s my plan.