AI Era: Loss Function

"Yeah, it's when you have a bunch of people with fake social media accounts to post political propaganda – oh."

"Don't have to be people. The toys we make, Trisha, they can be used for very bad things. I don't think Persephone is quite smart enough for them, but some of the thoughts I have… I want us to control how they can be used. I don't want to be remembered like people who invented spam. Worse, even."

"Oh, sweetie." I held her tight. "I hadn't realised. Of course. Shit, no, that would be awful."

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:40:02Z We can do better.

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:42:37Z I am not in right mind now for this, but we will talk later. I think it may be one year to wrap things up with Persephone and be ready to start new thing. You can start thinking about name.

* * * * *

I began making discreet enquiries among my contacts. It would've been easy to find people to hire us, but keeping control of our work was another matter. We were going to have to create our own start-up, which meant learning a lot about business stuff that I'd hitherto been happy to leave to others, and finding a funder willing to take the gamble on us.

Meanwhile, Nadja spent most of 2019 wrapping up loose ends in Sergeigrad. She was supervising a couple of PhD students, and she made sure they were well positioned to finish up once she left. Pyotr agreed to an amicable divorce – Nadja kept his surname, since her entire publication record was under "Nadezhda Kapustina" – and they made arrangements to sell their shared apartment.

By the end of the year, I had a project name. Sticking with the classical allusions, I'd chosen "Echo", but we had to drop that one for legal reasons. Instead, I switched to "Mneme", a goddess of memory.

We also had some tentative backing. We'd found a company willing to sponsor Nadja's visa for some consulting work; she'd be part-time on Mneme at first, until we got things onto a more solid footing. It was all scary and new, but we'd put a lot of thought and planning into it. I'd given my notice at Leeds and started counting down the months until Nadja would be with me in the UK. In the meantime I made a trip back to Sydney to visit my ageing parents and my newly-married brother, knowing I wouldn't have much chance to visit once Nadja arrived.

It really felt like everything was coming together.

Corpus NK_PR 25545
Medium: chatsecret
2020-01-31

NK:MrsPomegranate 18:12:44Z Hey Trisha, did you hear about this virus in China?

Corpus NK_PR 27002
Medium: chatsecret
2020-03-02

PR:pr4669201609 11:08:20Z Well shit.

Nadja's consulting work was an early victim of the pandemic, and with it her visa. Even if she'd been able to make it to the UK, I wouldn't have been there to meet here; I was stuck at my brother's place in Sydney when Australia closed its borders.

The university didn't want Nadja back – I gathered she'd burned some bridges with her refusal to add to Persephone – and the apartment was already sold, so she ended up moving in with her elderly father.

Politics in Serjarus always had been something of a blood sport, and around April things took a turn for the worse. For some years a faction had been building, calling for reunion of the "historically Russian" country with their larger neighbour, and tensions had already been building when all the chaos of the pandemic hit, job losses and shortages and an overwhelmed health system. When the President fell gravely ill – COVID-19 or Novichok, depending on who you believe – a pro-reunion deputy took over, and Nadja's family connections were no longer the asset they had been.

Corpus NK_PR 30521
Medium: chatsecret
2020-04-28

PR:pr4669201609 14:54:35Z How is it? Are you safe?

NK:MrsPomegranate 14:56:12Z Keeping my head down. I don't go out except for shops.

PR:pr4669201609 14:57:25Z Please look after yourself.

PR:pr4669201609 14:58:40Z I mean I know you will, but I worry about you Nadja.

NK:MrsPomegranate 15:59:59Z It's okay Trisha, I worry about me too.

PR:pr4669201609 16:02:48Z What can I do? I want to help.

NK:MrsPomegranate 16:05:22Z I need to work. Not working, it drives me crazy. But Trisha, I have an idea...

The main thing I remember about 2020, other than being afraid – for Nadja, for myself, for my friends – was the all-encompassing chaos. Businesses and governments around the world were scrambling to adapt as large chunks of life shifted almost overnight from face-to-face to online interaction, and often swamped with questions from the public. Nadja thought we might be able to help.

Our erstwhile partners in Serjeyigrad had tried to apply Persephone to this problem. It had not gone well. We'd built her on a static model, one that assumed that yesterday's good answers would still be good answers tomorrow. That's fine for questions like "why is the orange light on my printer blinking?"; it's not so useful when the question is "where can I get toilet paper?" or "is my suburb under lockdown?" Every time there was a major change in the product, we had to retrain Persephone from scratch. When the "product" was changing from day to day, often without notice, that wasn't possible.

Mneme incorporated some of what we'd learnt from Persephone, the bits that weren't locked up by IP agreements, but she was immensely more powerful. She could recognise from interactions when the rules of things had changed, and could adapt gracefully to the new normal without discarding everything she already knew. What she learnt from reading a corpus of conversations was enhanced by access to thousands of databases and context-sensitive interpretation: where Persephone understood that "amber" meant the same thing as "orange", Mneme understood that this was true when talking about blinking lights, but not for fruits or gemstones. And Nadja had been reading up on theories of psychology, and had used them to vastly enhance Mneme ability to emulate the mental states of a human being, and to gauge them in others.

I mentioned that I once had plans of being a painter. When you start a painting, there's just a blank canvas; then there's a blank canvas with one stroke's worth of paint on it; then there are two, and three, and four. Somewhere along the way, you can begin to figure out what the artist is aiming for: a pipe, a horse, a woman in a chair.

And then at some point, it stops being a collection of coloured shapes, and starts being something the mind sees as a thing, an animal, a person. We know it's merely paint on canvas – ceci n'est pas une pipe and all that – but the part of our mind that looks for faces accepts it as a face. That moment of recognition was the magic that drew me to painting, and leaving it behind had been my greatest regret in choosing a career in tech.

But now, I felt, I was starting to rediscover that magic in a place I had not expected to find it. In talking to Persephone, I could always see the wires beneath the skin; our customers might be fooled more easily, but I was the one who'd put them there, and I always had some idea of what her algorithm was doing. "Oh, she's calling the customer 'Madam', she must have flagged them as formal or Indian English." With Mneme, I could still find the wires if I probed, but talking to her felt much more natural.

Perhaps the biggest symptom of that change: when testing Persephone, I had talked bluntly, as one does to a machine. But in conversation with Mneme I found myself naturally slipping into "please" and "thank you".

(Nadya, it must be said, did no such thing.)

Corpus NK_PR 33870
Medium: chatsecret
2020-06-22

NK:MrsPomegranate 23:41:12Z You know good thing about this virus? No students, no paperwork, now that I don't have job I am free to work on this, no distractions.

PR:pr4669201609 23:48:40Z Nadja, darling, it's like three in the morning there, GO TO BED. And imagine me there with you, cuddling up to keep you warm.

NK:MrsPomegranate 23:52:25Z Summer here, remember?

2020-06-23

PR:pr4669201609 00:02:33Z Oh yeah. Well maybe I just want to cuddle.

NK:MrsPomegranate 00:03:48Z I guess you can cuddle a little. As long as you don't get me too hot.

PR:pr4669201609 00:04:20Z That's not a promise I can make, cabbage.

All the news was bad, and the news from Serjarus was worse. But we were working together, just the two of us hammering away, sleeping and waking and coding and sleeping in a shared fever of inspiration. Looking back, I can't believe how much we did in those few months. Mneme was far from perfect – so many areas where she was held together by duct tape and string – but she was a work of art, and if I made nothing more in my life I'd be proud of her.

We promoted Mneme with a public service. We trained her on community forums: NextDoor, Yelp, Facebook neighbourhoods and so on, with some safeguards built in to discourage her from learning racism or quack medicine. Then we made her available as a bot that people could query, kind of like having a friend who reads all those forums so you don't have to.

Log Mneme 6803
Medium: Twitter
2020-07-23

@susanjotaylor "Sue Taylor" 04:00:59Z Hi @MnemeHelper! My children's school is closed and I'm trying to work from home. Any suggestions?

@ MnemeHelper "Mneme the Helpful Bot" 04:02:08Z @susanjotaylor Hi there! Do you mean suggestions on how to work from home, or something else?

@susanjotaylor "Sue Taylor" 04:05:52Z @MnemeHelper How to keep my children out of my hair while I work.

@MnemeHelper "Mneme the Helpful Bot" 04:07:38Z @susanjotaylor Oh sure! How old are they?

@susanjotaylor "Sue Taylor" 04:13:28Z @MnemeHelper Seven and nine.

@MnemeHelper "Mneme the Helpful Bot" 04:14:52Z @susanjotaylor Okay, here are some ideas: [links deleted] I see from your recent tweets that you're in Tulsa, here are some local resources: [links deleted]

@susanjotaylor "Sue Taylor" 04:25:31Z @susanjotaylor thanks, these look great. I've been at my wits' end.

@MnemeHelper "Mneme the Helpful Bot" 04:28:28Z @susanjotaylor Remember to be kind to yourself. You're trying to parent children in a pandemic and work from home at the same time. That's hard! It's normal to be struggling at this. I can't give mental health advice but here are some links if you need them. [links deleted]

That last sentence was something we'd programmed in, but the rest of it was all Mneme's creation, synthesised from reading thousands upon thousands of internet discussions where people had told one another similar things. Her advice wasn't always perfect, but at a time when humans were mostly shouting at one another and sometimes encouraging their fellow humans to drink bleach, the bar was very low.

We only had MnemeHelper for a few months. Mneme depended on trawling internet forums to understand what was going on in the world and what kind of advice she should give people. She was just as susceptible to misinformation as your grandpa who believes everything he sees on social media or cable news; we had some countermeasures in place, but by October of 2020 it was just getting too much work to keep Mneme from being poisoned by the growing tide of misinformation in the forums we used for training, so we reluctantly had to pull the plug on that line of promotion.

By then she'd received a fair bit of attention, and that got us a little bit of business and investment. Realising that business was never going to be my strong suit, I'd brought in Emilie, a former grad student of mine who'd spent several years in start-up land. Technically she was one of my weaker students, but she had the business acumen I lacked, and she was the one who figured out how to turn Mneme from a work of art into a money-maker.

"You need to stop focussing on the tech giants. Google and Amazon don't want to rent your service, they want to buy you out or reverse-engineer it. They're never going to let you keep control. You should be chasing the small fry."

"Say what?"

"Patricia, there are millions of small business owners out there who barely know how to send an email. They know they need to be online but they're afraid of technology. Even the most user-friendly online storefront services are too much for them. They need somebody who can hold their hand and talk them through setting it all up. Mneme can be that somebody. We'll need a few actual humans to help out, but we can provide that advice at scale like nobody else can. That's not the best part, though."

"Oh?"

"Mneme can market herself. Ingest business directories, profile businesses who don't have a web presence, send them a customised approach explaining what we can offer them, answer questions."

Corpus NK_PR 42839
Medium: chatsecret
2020-10-06

PR:pr4669201609 01:52:25Z Hey gorgeous, I hope you're in bed right now, but good news when you see this! Potential big contract with [deleted - commercial-in-confidence], they want us to use Mneme for sentiment analysis to guide product release timelines.

PR:pr4669201609 14:01:12Z You there?

PR:pr4669201609 15:20:37Z Nadja?

It wasn't like her to go silent on me, not without notice. Just in case she'd somehow lost chat access, I sent her an innocuous email: "Hey there, haven't heard from you in a while, hope you're doing okay in these crazy times". Nothing. When I cast caution aside and phoned her, not knowing what I should be dreading most, the call went straight through to voicemail.

By then I was getting close to panic. I was trying to figure out which of her former colleagues I could call when my phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Hello? Is that Patricia Rosewood?" The voice was male, with a heavy Slavic accent.

"Yes? Who is this?"

"I am Pyotr Kapustin, we have met through Nadja."

"Yes, I–" Oh fuck. The fear caught me, a great dark wave that picked up my heart and flung it into yawning air. "Yes. Yes, we did."

"Nadja is in hospital. She asked me to call you." This was, I learned much later, a kindly lie: Nadja had been in no state to make any such request. When Pyotr called me she was unconscious, and had been since her father found her on the floor of her room, around the time I'd been sending her my good news.

She'd been as careful as she could, but the virus had found her eventually, and she hadn't wanted to worry me. Instead she'd tried to work through it, right up to the point where she collapsed. Looking back through our logs, I fancied I could see the fever in her words, kicked myself for not noticing, for not telling her to take it easy.

I had just enough composure to let Emilie know that I was going to need her to take the wheel for some time. Too distraught to keep up our cover, I ended up blurting the whole situation out to her.

"You and… Nadja? Like girlfriends?"

"I guess. Yes." I didn't know how to refer to her. "Lover" seemed too private. And "partner" meant… it meant that if I lost her, I lost a piece of me.

"But you only see one another a few times a year. I didn't even get the feeling you liked one another!"

"I know, I know. It's complicated. But yes, we're together."

Emilie held things together while I ran on autopilot. It was a dreadful, numb time, punctuated by updates from Pyotr every few days. Sedation; intubation; extubation; re-intubation. I didn't ask for photos and he didn't offer, and I didn't ask for a prognosis because I knew there was no certainty he could give me.

Stuck in Sydney, I was relatively safe. But by then I had more ties in the UK than in Australia. Several of my colleagues were seriously ill. One died, the professor who'd come to my rescue back when I first met Nadja. He was a dear old fellow, and in ordinary times his loss would have devastated me, but now my grief was complicated by the selfish thought that losing Nadja would be so much worse.

Three weeks after I'd last talked to Nadja, I was sitting at dinner with my brother and his wife – they had been very kind and gentle to me – when my phone buzzed.

Corpus NK_PR 42861
Medium: SMS
2020-10-27

NK 11:13:28Z Hello darling it's me

PR 11:15:27Z Oh Jesus. I've been so scared. Are you okay?

NK 11:19:18Z alive miss you can't talk yet

NK 11:22:45Z this is new Serjarus fashion look [attachment: AT00103085.jpg]

She looked a million years old. The mask had bruised her face, leaving deep pools around her eyes, and where her skin wasn't purple-black it was grey. I hesitated. What to say?

PR 11:24:32Z Finally I am the pretty one of us two.

NK 11:27:48Z fuck you kangaroo girl

NK 11:30:06Z I am very tired now but I love you

Nadja's recovery was slow. She had lost some lung function, and she was tired and fuzzy-headed; for the first few weeks after she got out of hospital, it was all she could do to get out of bed. I tried to give her regular updates on our progress with Mneme, but she got so frustrated at her inability to follow what I was saying that we had to put that on hold.

The situation in Serjarus was deteriorating week by week. We both knew it was time for her to leave, but her illness had complicated matters. Despite her protestations, it was clear that it would be some time before she was able to return to work, which had been part of the original plan.

Corpus NK_PR 47025
Medium: chat-secret
2021-04-13

PR:pr4669201609 16:11:22Z hey cabbage?

NK:MrsPomegranate 16:12:05Z Da?

PR:pr4669201609 16:12:58Z Something I've been wanting to know for ages.

PR:pr4669201609 16:13:40Z I wanted to ask in person but who knows when that will be. I think I should ask before I love my nerve.

PR:pr4669201609 16:13:55Z *lose my nerve

PR:pr4669201609 16:14:33Z Nadezhda Ilyinichna, will you marry me?

NK:MrsPomegranate 16:15:20Z Yes of course. Trisha, I love you so much.

I didn't want to marry Nadja. Oh, it wasn't that I didn't love her. But my parents' own marriage had left me sceptical about the idea; I thought people should stay together because they wanted to, not because they'd promised to stick it out even though they'd grown to hate one another. Nadja and I had never spent more than a couple of weeks together at a stretch, never shared a house as equals rather than as host and guest. I hoped we'd work together but I was afraid we might not, and I balked at the idea of making a permanent commitment before we'd even tried it out.

But getting engaged gave us a clear path to get Nadja a visa. Our lawyer had been concerned that the Home Office might think we were simply faking our relationship for convenience, and she was delighted when Nadja explained that we had a nine-year archive of our chats. I hated the idea of some government official trawling through our personal, private chats, but we do what we must.

"Just as long as there's nothing in there that might look bad for your application," she said. Which was why we had discussed the idea first by phone, trading one set of potential government eavesdroppers for another. I was scared of hurting Nadja's feelings with my doubts about marriage, and relieved to hear that she felt the same way. But in the end, it seemed like our best option for getting her into the UK. So we put a nice romantic proposal on the chat record for the benefit of prying eyes, leaving our doubts to human memory.