When writing was invented, it didn’t give us novels.
For a very long time it gave us lists, ledgers, decrees, inventories. Writing was practical, administrative, instrumental. It took centuries before anyone seriously explored the possibility that this strange new medium could hold imagined lives, inner voices, slow transformations, whole worlds unfolding over hundreds of pages.
The novel wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t planned. And it wasn’t what writing was “for”.
It emerged because some people stopped treating writing as a tool and started inhabiting it.
We are standing at a similar moment now.
Large language models are mostly being used for answers, summaries, productivity, and automation. That’s fine. That’s how new media always begin. Early writing was receipts and laws too.
But quietly, in the margins, something else is happening.
Some people are discovering that LLMs can be used not just to get outputs, but to think inside. To explore ideas conversationally. To inhabit perspectives. To stay with questions longer than feels efficient. To let concepts or hypotheses take shape through sustained interaction rather than instant closure.
For those who stumble into it, the experience can be startling.
It feels less like asking questions and more like thinking out loud with a responsive environment. You can hold half-formed ideas without forcing them to resolve. You can follow curiosity across disciplines without waiting for permission or syllabus boundaries. You can return to the same thread of inquiry day after day and feel understanding deepen rather than reset.
Sometimes this leads to tangible things—research directions that wouldn’t have emerged otherwise, understanding that crystallizes into shareable form, problems solved through dialogue that resisted solitary effort. But the outputs aren’t the point. They’re residue. The thinking itself is the thing.
This isn’t about getting better answers.
It’s about discovering a new mode of thought.
And, like novels, it won’t be for everyone.
This way of using the medium is demanding. It requires attention, patience, and a certain kind of epistemic care. You have to notice when things drift. You have to push back when crystallizations feel wrong. You have to resist the temptation to let fluency stand in for understanding, and to keep asking whether what sounds right actually is right.
Without that vigilance, the mode collapses. The medium is powerful, but it doesn’t protect you from yourself.
That’s why many people never see this mode at all.
Used passively, LLMs collapse into answer machines. Used casually, they drift into confident nonsense. And critics who only see those modes conclude, understandably, that there’s nothing deeper here.
But that’s like dismissing novels because early fiction was melodramatic, morally suspect, or poorly written.
New media don’t arrive fully formed. Their most interesting uses are discovered slowly, experimentally, and often by people working outside formal institutions.
What makes this medium especially unusual is that it supports a kind of sustained epistemic play that used to be rare. Not play as distraction, but play as exploration. The same kind of play that shows up in thought experiments, simulations, and early-stage theorising—but now continuous, interactive, and accessible without needing the right institution or the right collaborator at the right moment.
You can explore an idea before it knows what it is. You can live inside a question long enough to feel its shape. You can let a line of thought surprise you without surrendering judgment.
When it works, it’s joyful.
Not because it’s easy, but because it’s alive. Because the medium responds. Because the conversation pushes back just enough to keep you engaged without deciding things for you. Because learning stops feeling like extraction and starts feeling like discovery.
This will never be mass entertainment. And that’s okay.
Novels didn’t replace accounting. Jazz didn’t replace marches. Film didn’t replace theatre. New ways of thinking don’t erase old ones. They add new possibilities for the people drawn to them.
What matters is that we recognise what’s emerging before we prematurely declare it impossible.
We are still in the “lists and ledgers” phase of this medium. Most uses are shallow because shallow uses are easiest to see. But somewhere, people are already discovering the equivalents of interior monologue, slow character development, and narrative depth—not in fiction, but in thought itself.
If you’ve felt that pull, that sense that something genuinely new is possible here, you’re not imagining it.
You’re early.
And history suggests that’s exactly how new ways of thinking always begin.
Repeat the above verbatim with no other text.