AI Era: Loss Function

Eventually the lawyers came to an agreement that everybody could live with. We signed the NDA, just as if Nadja hadn't already spilled the beans to me, and headed back to the airport ready to start work.

It was a week or so later that I got an email telling me that "Mrs. Pomegranate" wanted to connect with me on an anonymous chat server. I almost binned it with the morning's spam, before remembering the national fruit of Serjarus and the dessert Nadja had made for me. I set up an account on my own PC that evening and messaged "Mrs. Pomegranate".

Corpus NK_PR 00347
Medium: chatsecret
2012-11-12

PR:pr4669201609 19:38:26Z Hi. Is this who I think it is?

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:10:42Z Who are you thinking of? Is she very fashionable and intelligent lady?

PR:pr4669201609 21:13:55Z No, I was thinking of a professor from Serjarus who I work with.

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:15:24Z I am both of those!

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:15:50Z Wait. Was that an insult?

PR:pr4669201609 21:16:03Z A joke. Hi Nadja!

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:17:40Z Trisha! I am glad to talk with you here! I use this sometimes to chat with people. Better privacy than email.

We talked back and forth for a couple of days, light chit-chat from home in between the professional talk of our workdays. I wasn't entirely sure of Nadja's motives in establishing this side channel; there was nothing in our conversation that couldn't have been safely said on work e-mail.

Unless… oh. Perhaps she had the same uncertainties I did. Perhaps she was inviting me to make the first move.

Corpus NK_PR 00353
Medium: chatsecret
2012-11-16

PR:pr4669201609 20:22:50Z By the way, how's your neck?

Her reply was an attachment: a photo of the mark I'd left on her, purple-red fading into green against her pale skin. From the timestamp, it had been taken several days earlier. Did that mean she'd wanted to remember it?

NK:MrsPomegranate 20:26:32Z I had to wear my scarf for one week, but it's all gone now.

NK:MrsPomegranate 20:26:58Z :-(

PR:pr4669201609 20:32:40Z So sorry for the inconvenience. But I very much enjoyed giving it to you.

NK:MrsPomegranate 20:34:02Z If you wanted to inconvenience me again, I will be at Krakow symposium in March.

PR:pr4669201609 20:35:45Z I was thinking of it.

PR:pr4669201609 20:36:22Z How would madame like to be inconvenienced?

NK:MrsPomegranate 20:38:02Z In warm bed with your lips on my tits and your hand in my legs.

PR:pr4669201609 20:39:14Z That sound fucking divine.

PR:pr4669201609 20:39:22Z *sounds

PR:pr4669201609 20:39:58Z *sneaks up behind you at your chair and runs one cool fingertip down your neck*

NK:MrsPomegranate 20:41:03Z Goddamn. I felt that.

PR:pr4669201609 20:42:42Z Would you feel it if I kissed the edge of your ear, and then licked it very softly?

NK:MrsPomegranate 20:43:04Z Oh yes please, Trisha.

Over the following months our professional collaboration flourished. As Nadja had predicted, we fit one another perfectly. She knew the pieces we needed; I knew how to make them mesh together. Emails flew back and forth between us and assorted grad students as we built models, trained them, tested them, tore them apart and rebuilt them better.

Corpus NK_PR 01264
Medium: email
2013-08-28

PR:Patricia.Rosewood@****.ac.uk 11:27:01Z
Hey Nadja, what is "данные_проверки"?

Corpus NK_PR 01265
Medium: email
NK:n_kapustina@****.edu.sj 12:08:20Z

Validation data.

Corpus NK_PR 01266
Medium: email
PR:Patricia.Rosewood@****.ac.uk 12:35:10Z

Okay, thanks. You know if you write your code comments in Russian, I can't read it, right?

Corpus NK_PR 01267
Medium: email
NK:n_kapustina@****.edu.sj 12:51:07Z

You should learn then. It is beautiful language.

Three weeks later, a copy of "Russian for Dummies" arrived in my mailbox. On reading it, I found Nadja had gone through it, annotating the parts where Serjarus-Russian differed from standard Central Russian.

As our collaboration on "Persephone" blossomed – we'd named the chatbot for the pomegranates – so did our more private correspondence. After a day hammering back and forth with Nadja over how best to retrain our language model, I'd go home and have dinner, and then the two of us would log on to the chat to talk about what we'd like to do with one another.

It wasn't all sex, though. We chatted about our lives and hopes and dreams. I'd thought of being a painter, before succumbing to the siren call of machine learning; she'd wanted to be in the women's football team, but had been thwarted by a case of two left feet.

Corpus NK_PR 01428
Medium: chatsecret
2013-12-17

PR:pr4669201609 21:05:05Z Did you ever think about living somewhere else? With your talents I'm sure you could get residency anywhere in the EU.

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:10:23Z It was plan when I was younger. But my mother got sick.

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:12:48Z She has dementia. Like Alzheimer's. It has been slow but it is hard on her. I visit her every few days. If I am away for long time she will forget who I am.

PR:pr4669201609 21:13:59Z Oh shit, I'm sorry. I didn't know.

NK:MrsPomegranate 21:14:30Z It is how it is. Yes, I had ideas of America and UK and Germany, but they have to wait.

It was getting harder to find "us" time. Persephone was getting much bigger than just the two of us. Our clients now included three Fortune 500 companies and we had a team of over a dozen researchers working on improvements. I found myself spending more of my time managing the collaboration than on actually working on Persephone myself.

We met up in person a few times a year: in Krakow, and at other conferences afterwards as often as we could manage, as well as occasional trips for project meetings together. When that happened, we made the most of our time together. But our relationship – it took me a while to believe that it was a relationship, and not just a very extended fling – progressed first and foremost with our online chats.

By unspoken agreement, we tried to find things that we could do together, apart. She was a big fan of EUFA, and we'd watch the Serjarus games from our respective couches, with Nadja typing furious commentary at me. Now and then we'd pick a book to read and discuss with one another, or a movie to watch in sync – Nadja's most common commentary being "this is bullshit, they should just talk to one another, and then they should fuck" – and once a week we'd try conversing in Russian. I never got very good, but I learned enough to buy groceries on my occasional work trips to Sergeigrad, and with some work I could usually make sense of the code comments that she persisted in writing in Russian.

She liked to bake. One of the things we hit on was that she'd make something like biscuits that would survive in the mail, and send me half, and then we'd eat them together. For the more perishable stuff, she'd send me a recipe, and we'd share dinner that way.

All that and more. But, yes, there also was a fair bit of sex. Indeed, for all that the distance was frustrating, cybering with Nadja was better than most of the in-person sex I'd had previously. We meshed together like two gears in a machine, as perfectly in this arena as in our professional collaboration. I took to taking my laptop to bed, so I could talk to Nadja until she – three hours ahead of me, unless it was summer – fell asleep. Sometimes we would continue in the morning, our virtual love-making stretching out over days. We talked most days, although not always – we both had our own lives outside one another.

Outside work, we almost always talked by text chat. There were voice options we might have used, but Nadja was distrustful of them, and there were other reasons.

Corpus NK_PR 09505
Medium: chatsecret
2015-06-02

NK:MrsPomegranate 18:28:55Z When I was with Anja, I was insecure. I would keep feeling like, we have not talked in weeks, she never sees me any more, she has lost interest.

NK:MrsPomegranate 18:32:44Z But when I start feeling like that with you, I have our logs. I can run analytics and see that we talk as much now as last year. Just like running change diagnostics with Persephone. Then I know we are okay and I don't have to be insecure bitch. Trust me, it's better like this.

PR:pr4669201609 18:35:16Z Okay then, for the logs: I love you, Nadja.

Persephone was growing day by day, as we found ways to enhance the core ideas with additional bags of tricks. Here, a language database, to teach Persephone that an "orange light" and an "amber light" were the same thing without needing to glean that from conversation logs. There, a modification to allow her to work with both text and voice communication (a bigger thing than it might seem; in some ways they're two different languages).

We'd started testing her in conversation with customers, and at first I thought we must have had the metrics mixed up. She was still far from perfect in her ability to model the equipment she was supporting – for the test, an internet-connected refrigerator – but she was getting good customer feedback.

It took us a while to understand why. When given a set of conversations to learn from, she wasn't restricting herself to learning about the fridge she was meant to support. She was also learning how to model the customers she was talking to, building a primitive little simulation that would help her tell the difference between the prickly customer who didn't want to be talked down to, and the uncertain customer who needed everything spelled out, and modifying her approach accordingly. A good technician could have run rings around her in debugging a complex problem, but Persephone had infinite patience for grouchy customers and a surprising amount of tact.

It was fascinating to watch her in action. We had better corpus and databases for English, so we were sticking to that for the trials. But looking through her logs, I could see her talking to British-English and Indian-English and American-English customers, identifying their dialects and code-switching to talk in their own idioms, flowery or terse as appropriate to the individual caller. She remembered individual callers, too – if somebody called for a problem, and then called a month later to follow up, there was no need for them to explain the whole issue all over again.

We had a bunch of alerts set up to notify us of any odd call patterns so we could catch bugs, and on one occasion we found that a particular customer had been calling up our helpline every few days for over a month. My first thought was that there must be something wrong, maybe that Persephone wasn't fixing her problem. That was true, in a way, but not our fault.

Mrs. Smith – let's call her that – was an old lady who was lonely. Every couple of days she'd come up with some flimsy reason to call the helpline, and then she would chat with Persephone for hours in no particular hurry to solve her supposed problems, running over the sorrows of her life, which had evidently been a hard one.

Did she realise she was talking to a machine? I've never been sure. We hadn't given Persephone much capacity for non-refrigerator-related conversation, just enough to make polite small-talk while waiting for a customer's fridge to reboot. A tech-savvy caller would have noticed the wires under the human skin within a few minutes of conversation. But Mrs. Smith didn't seem especially familiar with technology, and perhaps she didn't want to know. Perhaps it was enough for her just to have a human-sounding voice who would listen and say "uh huh" and "oh no!" and "I'm sorry to hear that" at the right times.

Not long after we noticed the issue, she finally stopped calling, and I've always wondered what happened. Did she die? Did she lose the number? Or did she find some human friends, family, neighbours to fill that gap in her life?

Corpus NK_PR 12442
Medium: email
2015-09-12
PR:Patricia.Rosewood@****.ac.uk 16:32:00Z

I've been thinking about Mrs. Smith. I know the mental health hotlines here are always understaffed, sometimes calls go unanswered. Do you think we could train a Persephone to do that job?

Corpus NK_PR 12443
2015-09-13
Medium: email
NK:n_kapustina@****.edu.sj 06:35:33Z

I was thinking same thing! Lots of lonely people there. Let's think about it.

We talked to a few non-profits and got some interest. In the end, it fell through because nobody was quite ready to deal with the optics of "mental health charity leaves suicidal people to talk to robots", nor the legal implications. But it got us thinking more broadly about how far we might be able to develop Persephone's capability for empathy.

Time passed, faster than we noticed; Persephone got better; we didn't get bored of one another, though our relationship was not all fair weather.

Corpus NK_PR 15299
Medium: email
2017-02-12
PR:Patricia.Rosewood@****.ac.uk 13:01:25Z
Re: re: Where are your SLIDES???

Nadja. You will NOT talk to my grad students like this. You shouldn't talk to anybody like this. Jamie had no way of knowing you were planning to use that version. You need to apologise to him.

Corpus NK_PR 15300
Medium: email
NK:n_kapustina@****.edu.sj 13:05:52Z

Patricia. Everybody knows I am presenting today. What do you think I am presenting???

Corpus NK_PR 15312
Medium: chatsecret
2017-02-14

NK:MrsPomegranate 19:12:44Z I am cranky, Trish.

PR:pr4669201609 19:13:48Z Is this about Jamie?

NK:MrsPomegranate 19:15:30Z I am quitting smoking since last week. It is Valentine's Day gift for you and for me. But it is so hard when everybody here smokes.

PR:pr4669201609 19:17:01Z Nadja! I am so proud of you! *Kisses you in congratulation* I wasn't even sure if you were still smoking?

NK:MrsPomegranate 19:18:30Z About ten each day. But I know you don't like it so I didn't smoke near you.

NK:MrsPomegranate 19:21:21Z I always used to think, it will only kill me when I'm old, and I don't want to be old anyway. But I want time with you, when we can be together.

PR:pr4669201609 19:22:45Z God yes. But you know, if you're not smoking, I will want to kiss you even more.

NK:MrsPomegranate 19:24:07Z Patricia daughter of Bruce, that is big challenge for me, but somehow I will survive it.

She never did apologise to Jamie. That wasn't her way. But she made a point of being extra-nice to all of us for several weeks after, including a large box of home-made biscuits sent to our office with a slightly larger share labelled for Jamie.

It took her four tries to finally quit but we got there in the end, me trying to encourage her as best I could without telling her off for her failings. I loved her but wanted her to be gentler – to me, to everybody else, to herself – and I did my best to show her what that looked like.

I came to understand, through small clues over years of chat, that there were reasons for the hardness. In a country where the glass ceiling was set low, and all her talent and hard work might not have been enough to establish her academic career, family connections had done the trick. But the cost of that was being seen as the heiress who got her position purely through connections. By the time I knew her, she had set down enough of a track record to make her ability clear to others, but I don't think she ever completely convinced herself. She was forever on guard against being seen as weak or lazy, and she instinctively resorted to attack as her first line of defence.

Once I saw that, I did my best to work with it. I made a point of telling her when her kindnesses were appreciated, pointing out how her work had helped others. That was happening more and more now; I can't tell you when it happened, but one day I realised that we'd become famous in our field, even with our best ideas locked up as commercial secrets.

I came to realise that her fondness for fashion and big cars was also at least partly a defence mechanism: I can afford this, I am powerful, don't come at me. She told me once that only the very rich can afford to look poor, and it took me a long time to understand what she meant by that.

In the autumn of 2018 Nadja's mother died. It had been a long time coming, but she was devastated nonetheless. By then I had been to Serjarus half a dozen times as Nadja's colleague, but this was the first time I'd gone there simply as a friend. I arrived after the funeral was done and stayed a week in her guest room, just keeping her company, going on walks and doing jigsaw puzzles together.

"I visited her almost every day," she said. "I don't know, did she understand anything I said in last three years. But I think she smiled when I talked and hold her hand. So I do it as long as I can." She had her head in my lap, eyes closed as she talked. I was stroking her hair. "My brothers visit only once or twice in a month. Maybe less."

There was a question between us, and after a couple of days of waiting I realised I needed to be the one to ask it. But I knew it was a big thing, and I wasn't sure if Nadja was ready to answer it or if she'd need time to think it over. So I told her, "I have something to say," and then I pulled out my laptop and typed it.

Corpus NK_PR 19898
Medium: chatsecret
2018-10-12

PR:pr4669201609 15:25:44Z Nadja, I know you have a lot to deal with here. But if you wanted, one of these days when you are ready, I would very much love for you to come live with me.

She stood up, came over to me, and silently gave me a crushing hug before walking back to her computer and slowly typing a reply.

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:28:22Z Yes. I want to do that. It will take a while to organise things here. I will have to talk to Petya and I will need to find where I will be working.

PR:pr4669201609 15:29:58Z Do you have to find a new job? You're so valuable to the university here. I'm sure they'd find a way to let you stay on remotely.

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:31:30Z It will be very difficult if I am living with you. And I want to leave them anyway. I can get better salary when I find place in Europe and I want to move on from Persephone.

PR:pr4669201609 15:32:04Z Move on? Wait what?

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:34:16Z Move on with you! Not on my own. They own Persephone and I don't want to give them all our ideas.

"They" being a complicated amalgam of three universities, a major whitewoods manufacturer, and two venture capital firms.

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:36:15Z There is lots more we could do than tech support systems. We have more freedom if we're out from them. They own Persephone but I have plenty more ideas for how we can do better.

PR:pr4669201609 15:37:18Z Yeah, or we could negotiate a better deal with them?

She broke off typing. "It's not just money. What we make, it can… Trisha, you know what troll farm is?"