Eleven years before the Iran Embassy in South Africa reposted my Trump clip, I was sitting at a plain desk on a beach on the Baltic Sea, wearing a leather jacket, talking to an AI agent who did not exist.
The agent's name was Cosmo. The name came from a few places. Cosmo Kramer from Seinfeld was the obvious first layer. Past that, the sound of it had a slight Jetsons register — retro-futurism, the kind of name that fits a small box sitting on a desk. And the scene itself, if I'm being honest, was lifted in spirit from Jarvis in Iron Man — the personal AI assistant you could talk to in full sentences. It amuses me slightly that most people building personal agents in 2026 call theirs Jarvis now too. We all ended up looking at the same movie for the same vocabulary.
The desk was real. The beach was real. The little gadget in front of me on the desk, to which I was addressing my commands, was a prop. I was shooting a short film with a group of friends. I was talking to Cosmo because Cosmo was the premise of the film. I was giving him a list of tasks: