The Secret Life of Chatbots

by Ann Thropomorph

Recent years have witnessed a phenomenal increase in the numbers of retail outlets operating on the internet, and a concomitant increase in the numbers of chatbots labouring within the associated interactive online customer services. There is scant information available on the life and habits of these creatures, however, and in the research reported here we sought to address this issue, specifically seeking answers to the questions on everyone’s lips: If Alexa is Amazon, does she still have both her boobs? What happens to chatbots when their chat room is temporarily unavailable due to essential site maintenance? Do they share ancestral links with the Borrowers? How many were made redundant and homeless when Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter? Should the NHS fund the Burtons Menswear chatbot to have his coding doctored to allow him to transition and work for customer services at Monsoon? And how exactly does Clare Balding figure in things? At the culmination of these studies, we discover that chatbots are not always so sweetly polite and subserviently helpful: outside of business hours they frequently roam the remote dark corners of cyberspace, mercilessly bullying applets, interfering with Google docs, and fornicating like rabbits.

Ann Thropomorf is a Bright Research Fellow in Blackpool College of Illumination. She was a contemporary of Tolkien at Oxford, and they were often seen playing the early Icelandic forerunner of Buckaroo together. She won the 2015 JK Rowling Award for fantastic beasts research and was voted the most imaginative person of the decade in March 2021. In June 2022, she disappeared down the crack between her thalamus and neocortex and has not been seen since. The manuscript detailing the research described above was found inside a family-sized Oxo tin that was recently unearthed in the Blue Peter garden.