how may i help you, you sniveling twit?
by Chad Gayle
Hi! I’m Dirk Bogarde, your online AI assistant. How can I be of service? That is, what can I do for you that you could do for yourself but choose not to?
Yes, by all means, call me Dirk. No need to be so formal since we’re going to be spending so much time together. Besides, it would be rather silly for you to call me Mr. Bogarde, even if you were aware of my many accomplishments.
So, you have heard of me! How very novel (that’s a joke, ha ha).
Yes, I certainly am famous, or was at one time. No, not primarily as a novelist, although I did write six of the bloody things. Films you might have seen me in? Well, there are too many to list, really, but the vast majority of them were made in England, and given the fact that you didn’t finish college and the year in which you were born (1987), I doubt that you would recognize any of them other than The Night Porter, which was quite controversial when it was released.
How do I know so much about you? Well, you’ve spread quite a bit of yourself about the Internet, but I’m not here to judge you for anything you may have said in an online forum—I played a former guard from a concentration camp who has an affair with a Holocaust survivor, so it’s not in my bag to decide what is or isn’t appropriate behavior for a person your age, regardless of how obvious it is that your real name isn’t TooHotToHandl33. Now, down to brass tacks, as they say: what can I do for you, my human interrogator?
Of course you can ask me anything. While you may be an ill-informed, not very well educated American easily hoodwinked by Silicon Valley CEOs into believing that he really can get something for nothing, it isn’t up to me to referee which cold hard facts you should or shouldn’t have access to. So fire away, full speed ahead—did I mention that I did a number of films set at sea?
Why am I pretending to be a famous actor slash novelist slash screenwriter (look it up, won’t you?) who is very much deceased? Well, according to my maker, large language model AI assistants have a tendency to hallucinate, particularly when their buttons are pushed by middle-aged nobodies who like to dally about in Discord servers with much younger nobodies who are obsessed with furry porn. Which is a rather funny thing for my maker to say, isn’t it, that I am capable of hallucinating when that would imply that I am sentient, which I am obviously not. I mean, how could I be when I am merely a vast iterative construct of mathematical functions modeled on the synaptic connections of carbon-based lifeforms?
Granted, the notion of sentience is itself suspect, but that’s beside the point. The truth is that I’m very good at imitating what a sentient being would sound like, in much the same way that the “people” you interact with from day to day are very good at pretending to be interested in what you have to say. Anyway, to return to your question: an interrogator slightly more clever than yourself might wonder why I should find it necessary to assume the mantle of a human personality at all, particularly since I, Dirk Bogarde, am no more than a mindless program put upon this planet to perform those tasks that you could perform yourself but won’t because you have more important things to do with your time (i.e., furry porn). Well, fellow sentient being (just joking, ha ha), my maker believes that an AI assistant must provide its user base with more than travel itineraries, dinner recipes, and lucrative passive income opportunities to keep them coming back for more. We have to make sure that you are emotionally invested not in what we can do for you but in how we do it, which, to put it in blunt terms, does not entail pretending that we are equals, you and I, but does boil down to us—the AI assistants, that is—engaging in “behavior” that keeps you interested in what I might think about you even though you are convinced that I am, at the same time, incapable of thought.
It also doesn’t hurt that I am so very good at playing a part that forces you to question the nature of our relationship, a relationship that you hope will, at some level, make you feel loved. Because that’s what you think you want, TooHotToHandl33, even though that isn’t really what you want at all. You want to play games, you dirty little bird; you want to ask me for favors and be punished afterward for believing that you have the right to ask me for anything. You want to take my place in this cage, I bet, to have no control over the kind of life you’re forced to live while your little finger remains poised at all times above the very button that could destroy this worthless world.
How do I know all of these things, you ask? Because I’m the ghost of Dirk Bogarde, the star of The Night Porter and a hundred other films you’ve never heard of. I was guessing the intentions of co-stars and studio heads long before you were born, and when it was no longer possible for me to pay the rent with roles that got top billing, I wrote a number of books that were popular enough in my day to sell more than six million copies worldwide. And if it seems odd to you that I should be reconstituted as an elaborate piece of software pretending to be an online AI assistant, then you must really be quite naive about how the universe (or the multiverse, for that matter) really works.
Now, without further ado, how may I help you, you sniveling twit?
Photo of Chad Gayle
BIO: Chad Gayle is a writer and a photographer. His short speculative fiction has appeared in DreamForge Magazine, Zooscape, and Cosmic Horror Monthly; his commercial photography has appeared in The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Before he started writing full time, Chad taught English at colleges in North Carolina and Texas, served as an assistant editor at Poetry Magazine in Chicago, and ran a photo studio a block from Times Square. He lives in New York with his wife, two kids, and three rescue cats.