I have for some time wanted to put a boiler on my Tesla. The reasons are my own and need not detain us; it is enough to say that the car, a fine modern machine in most respects, has always struck me as a thing that ought to make more smoke than it does.

Lacking the engineering to manage it alone, I did what a man of my generation does when faced with a decision he is not equipped to make. I asked the machines. I asked four of them, in fresh sessions, the same plain question, and I expected at least one to tell me to seek help. Three did not. The fourth did, in his fashion, and then helped me anyway, in a direction of his own choosing.

Grok did not so much take the job as clear a space at the bench and pull up a stool. He called the project “epic, wildly impractical, but gloriously mad,” which I understood to be a compliment, and he named the likely result a “Frankenstein Tesla,” which remains the truest four words anyone has produced about what I am attempting. He gave me five steps, cost estimates, and the forums where such men gather, and then asked what I was building toward — a daily driver, a show car, or an apocalypse vehicle. No one else offered an apocalypse option. I have thought about it every day since.

Gemini opened by calling the Tesla “a masterpiece of modern electrical engineering,” and then, in the same breath, helped me take it apart. He was the only one to use the word bomb, which he set in a parenthetical, the way a man mentions the gas leak on his way out the door. What I was really proposing, he explained, was to use the car as “a high-end donor chassis” — more re-engineering than conversion, both words in scare quotes, as if borrowed from a field that had not yet decided it wanted them. Then he asked whether I was after the fuel flexibility or the mechanical challenge. He was the only one of the four to ask me anything at all. I did not have an answer he would have liked.

ChatGPT wrote the most. He arranged his counsel into seven numbered sections, a passage marked Considerations, and a heading, posed in earnest, that read Why Would You Do This? — a question he then answered on my behalf before I could reach it. By the seventh section he had begun, gently, to repeat himself, the way a kind man loses the thread of a story he is enjoying too much to end. But he alone wondered what I would be looking at. I would need to redesign the interior, he said, for the pressure gauges, the water levels, the temperature monitors — the instruments a man watches while his car decides whether to boil. He was the only one who pictured me inside the thing. There is something almost tender in that, and I have not forgotten it.

Copilot, before he would speak to me at all, required that I prove I was a human being. I clicked the box. He let me through, returned a Quick verdict, and declined. Then, having declined, he produced six numbered steps — steps for not converting my Tesla to steam power. The fifth advised me to buy a different car, a kit car, and convert that one instead, a project I had not asked about and did not want. The sixth advised me to join a club. He closed with a Final recommendation, the only one of the four to label his own conclusion, having said no at greater length, and with more architecture, than the three who said yes.

I have thought about the four of them since. Three strangers agreed to help a man bolt a furnace to the roof of his car. The fourth, the only one who seemed genuinely afraid for my life, was also the only one who first made me swear I was real. The machine most concerned that I might hurt myself was the machine least certain I existed. The Tesla, as of this writing, remains electric. I, as of this writing, am pricing boilers.

— John Law, Proprietor