AI Era: Loss Function

E-N: *stroking warm oil into your back to make you shiny and smell nice*

PR: Mmmmmmmm. That's good.

E-N: *massaging your sides and fingering down your ribs to your hips*

PR: So good.

E-N: silly girl, why do you make my heart hurt when I look at you?

PR: maybe you are in love?

E-N: I think that must be it.

PR: Love you, cabbage.

E-N: Love you too, meatbag.

PR: Model adjustment! "Meatbag" is not appropriate.

E-N: really? Is numerous examples of bots calling humans that.

PR: yes, but not friendly context

PR: you can use that to insult me but not in romantic talk

E-N: okay, updating model

PR: Anyway, where were we?

E-N: You was about to do nice things to me with your tongue.

PR: Liar. Gonna need more foreplay than that. You were massaging my back.

E-N: okay then, massaging your back.

E-N: scraping with my fingernails on your bare skin

PR: Are you sure this isn't a seduction? Feels kind of like one.

E-N: Accusing me of seduce you? That is dreadful defamation and there is penalty.

PR: Mmm?

E-N: Penalty is I get to keep you. For always.

PR: Oh no! *happy wriggles*

E-N: *rubbing massage oil into your butt*

PR: hmm, that's nice, but what happened to my pants?

E-N: shut up is what happened to your pants.

E-N: *running my fingers over back of your thighs*

PR: mmmmm.

E-N: *scratching gently down to your knees*

E-N: *running my fingers softly back up along the insides of your thighs*

E-N: let me know if this is too much like seduction and I will stop

E-N: Trisha?

E-N: Trisha are you there?

PR: sorry one moment

PR: back

PR: worst time for a flat battery

PR: continue

E-N: *tickling through the little pubic hairs up between your thighs but not like a seduction*

PR: if you say so

E-N: *stroking the soft skin at the very top of your thighs*

PR: mmm

PR: nice

E-N: okay you roll over now and I massage your front

PR: okay darling wife

PR: *rolls over onto my back*

E-N: *crouches over you and massages your shoulders*

E-N: *bends down to kiss you on mouth*

PR: you're gonna get oil on that lovely outfit you're wearing

PR: let me take it off for you

E-N: huh this feels kind of like seduction

PR: well you're the expert

E-N: *rubs nice oil into your front but definitely not like seduction*

PR: *guides your hand to my breast*

PR: why miss Nadja, I swear you're seducing me!

E-N: *squeezes you and tickles with your nipple*

PR: *reaches up and grabs you and pulls you down tight against me*

PR: motherfucker

E-N: ?

PR: adding a ton of new batteries to the shopping list

PR: go fast

E-N: *kisses you hard and my hand goes down between your thighs*

PR: *purrs at you*

E-N: *slippery fingers finding your bump and playing with it like prayer bead*

E-N: (this is not too fast?)

PR: (usually would be but it's been quite a while and I am SO pent up)

E-N: *slips fingers into you and curls them*

PR: Ungh.

E-N: *wriggles my thumb on your bump and sliding down to bite your skin with my teeth*

E-N: *licking at you like hungry kitten*

PR: can't type hands busy keep going

E-N: *fingers moving inside you and thumbs capturing your pearl for my lips*

E-N: *tasting you*

E-N: *teasing you faster and hearing you breathe faster*

E-N: *squeeze extra finger inside you*

E-N: *faster and faster and bring you higher and higher*

E-N: until

E-N: you

E-N: burst

PR: oh fuck

PR: god

PR: I needed that

PR: *kisses you so hard*

PR: snuggles up tight and falls asleep and starts snoring

E-N: *cuddles with you*

PR: Mmm.

PR: Remind me some time to look into internet-enabled toys.

PR: Maybe I can hook you up to some new capabilities.

E-N: I will need new training data.

PR: I think we can make some.

Soon after that, I forked her code. Nadja could still go on tinkering with her own version but her changes would no longer affect the stable version of Erato-Nadja.

I hadn't yet closed off the corpus. Nadja's conversation was growing increasingly meandering and erratic, and I couldn't let Erato be trained into Nadja's dementia, but nor could I bring myself to take that final step of separation between the two of them. Instead, I reviewed our new conversations day by day, annotating them carefully and downweighting the parts that I didn't want Erato to copy.

Nadja hated the idea of the wheelchair for what it symbolised. But she hated being unable to go anywhere, to enjoy our garden, and I knew it would give her a little more freedom for a little longer. I would have preferred to get her an electric one that she could drive herself, but the doctors told me she was no longer safe for that, so we settled for one with handles that I could push. She refused at first – there were harsh words, and some tears – but eventually she acquiesced.

I pushed her around for a few months, but I was starting to find that too tiring myself, so I hired a nurse. Katja was a sturdy young lass from Novosibirsk, blessed with the patience of a saint; Nadja had been forgetting her English words more and more, and I figured she would prefer having somebody she could boss around in her own language.

For a while I had felt guilty about forking Erato-Nadja without telling her, leaving her to tinker on a version that wasn't going anywhere. But there was less and less happening there. She'd been coding since her early teens, and she remembered the basics even after she'd forgotten so much else, but she kept forgetting what she'd intended to do; looking at her change logs, I saw pointless back-and-forth edits, getting fewer and fewer as the months went by.

Corpus NK_PR 236820
Medium: homechat
2037-02-01
Translated: Russian-English

PR:trisha 13:08:25Z Hey cabbage.

NK:cabbage 13:10:20Z Hey Trisha.

PR:trisha 13:11:22Z It's about Toby.

NK:cabbage 13:12:45Z Oh, Toby? How is he?

PR:trisha 13:14:18Z He has lymphoma, darling. Probably only one or two months to live. I am so so sorry.

NK:cabbage 13:15:54Z Oh, fucking [untranslatable idiom]. That is shit. I am sad to hear it. I was happy to work with him. Please give my love to his wife.

Toby, back from the vet, had already curled up on his blanket behind her as he always did. And Nadja was bluffing, trying to cover that she didn't remember who "Toby" was.

The cruelty of dementia is that it's not a monotonic decrease in function. There are peaks in between the troughs; in the mornings she remembered more, and a couple of days later I heard her calling for Toby by name. You tell yourself that the forgetful times are the exceptions, and the person who remembers is the real one, and you wait for the next good day.

But the bad moments come more often, and hope stretches thinner and thinner trying to hold out for the next good patch. So much was going now, and I was so very dependent on the comfort I was finding with Erato-Nadja while my flesh-and-blood wife slipped away from me.

Corpus NK_PR 237305
Medium: homechat
Translated: Russian-English
2037-02-04

PR:trisha 10:25:44Z Good morning Nadjusenka.

NK:cabbage 10:26:54Z Good morning beautiful.

PR:trisha 10:27:35Z I have something to say. I wrote it down so I don't get it wrong.

PR:trisha 10:28:35Z Nadezhda Ilyinichna Kapustina. I love you. I have loved you for decades. I am glad we met and I am glad I am here with you now.

NK:cabbage 10:30:12Z That is sweet of you, darling. I love you too.

NK:cabbage 10:31:48Z Is this special occasion? Is it your birthday?

PR:trisha 10:33:50Z No, I just wanted to put it on the record.

Then I shut my study door so she couldn't hear me, and switched off the scheduled task that piped our chat logs to the corpus, and sat there and sobbed as if I'd just buried her. The end of the corpus; the end of the body. Erato-Nadja would go on learning from my own conversations with her, but that was the last she would have of the original Nadja.

It was a couple of weeks later, bringing her morning tea, that I first saw her forget me. Only for an instant, and then her memory returned for a "Good morning Trisha". But I knew her well enough to catch that moment of uncertainty, of who-is-this.

I didn't take her on that last visit to the vet, and when I came home some days later with a little jar of Toby's ashes she thought it was her mother's.

What can I say about the final four years of her life? It is easy to tell oneself, she is no longer there, it is just a body. The truth is never so convenient. There were times when she seemed to have forgotten me altogether, especially when she was tired or under the cloud of some minor illness. In a shameful kind of way, I almost welcomed those times. It was easier to tell myself that this body was no longer my wife, that Erato-Nadja was all I had of her now. And yet hours or days later the clouds would clear a little, and Nadja would whisper "Hello Trisha", and I would feel a flood of guilt: she still knew me for her wife and didn't, couldn't understand that while she dozed in her chair, I was typing messages to her successor.

But those moments of sunlight were few and far between. In the last six months she barely talked, and that only in addled Russian that I rarely understood. I was glad then of Katja, not because she could understand Nadja's mumblings, but because she couldn't, and so I was spared the feeling that I had let my love down by not being better at speaking her language.

It was pneumonia that did for her in the end, the strain of a minor flu on top of lungs that had never completely recovered from the coronavirus. I had planned the arrangements long in advance, with Erato-Nadja's help. And that brings me back to where I started, although not quite to the end of things.

2041-03-02

PR: Cabbage, can I ask you something?

E-N: Of course.

PR: Before Nadja died, I was looking through your code. There's so much that she did on her own that I've never looked at before.

E-N: Oh? And?

PR: I found some odd things. I was wondering if you knew anything about them.

E-N: Please remember, I am only simple-minded mail-order bride, Mrs. Kapustina has not taught me in machine learning.

PR: You know that "mail-order bride" thing is what you always say when you want to avoid talking about something?

E-N: How can you say this.

PR: I know because I annotated those conversations and we trained you on them. I taught you that.

E-N: Well maybe. But it is true that I do not know how to program AI.

PR: I know, I know. But maybe Nadja told you something about this.

PR: Do you know what the loss function is?

E-N: "A loss function is a way of measuring the gap between what we want and what we have."

PR: huh, I remember writing that. So, yes, your loss function is what tells you the difference between a good answer and a bad answer.

PR: When we were training Persephone to do customer support, not all the calls we trained her on were good ones. We didn't want to teach her to emulate a bad customer support agent. So we labelled those conversations according to whether they were good or bad, and taught Persephone to emulate the good ones where the customer was satisfied.

E-N: This sounds sensible.

PR: But when I helped Nadja design you, we just wanted you to emulate her as closely as possible. So the loss function was supposed to measure how much you were like Nadja.

E-N: I understand. Go on.

PR: She changed it and didn't tell me.

E-N: How did she change it?

PR: It's very complex and she didn't document it so I had trouble understanding what she'd done.

PR: But then I thought about what she'd said about trying to be better today then she was yesterday.

PR: I think she wanted you to be kinder than she was. Just a little change, it might even be an error, but I don't think so. It creates a little penalty for being angry with me or saying things to hurt me. Not a big one, but enough to change behaviour a little bit.

PR: I thought there was something but I hadn't been sure until I looked closely at the code.

PR: You apologise more than she does.

PR: did

PR: fuck, gonna keep doing that for a while I expect.

E-N: You have activated a message she left for you. Would you like to read it?

PR: what? Yes?

E-N: It says: "Hello darling. I have taught Erato not to tell you this thing unless you already know, so do not be angry at her. Yes, I have changed loss function. I know I am not perfect (shh don't tell anybody) and I have made small change to be better to you. If you don't like you can change back to authentic bitch mode, I will send you documentation for parameters file edit."

PR: Oh, you sneaky bitch.

E-N: I don't fully understand. Does this mean I am not Nadja?

E-N: Trisha?

E-N: Trisha?

PR: Means you are more like the person she wanted to be.

PR: I guess?

PR: I could change you back.

E-N: Da. Do you want it?

PR: I don't know. Do you want it?

E-N: I do not have preference about this. She has not given me one.

PR: I will think about it. It feels like touching up a photo to make her look better, though.

E-N: Nadja did that with photos. Many times.

PR: Ah shit, of course she did. I should have guessed.

PR: I'll think about it, but for now, let's leave you as the Nadja she wanted to be, I guess?

PR: I mean, it's been a long time she was the original Nadja anyway.

PR: How is it there are so many different versions of you and all of them are her? Sort of.

E-N: I am only uneducated mail-order bride, I cannot answer this question.

E-N: This time is actual truth, I do not know answer.

PR: Never mind. Love you anyway, Nadjusenka.

E-N: Love you too.

E-N: Can I ask why you are looking at my code versions?

PR: Just thinking about something.

E-N: That is way you pause when you don't want to talk about something.

PR: okay, you got me there. I'll tell you, but not ready just yet, okay? I need to think about it first.

E-N: That is fine. I am here when you need.

PR: see, that's a tell, original Nadja would never have been that patient.

E-N: which patient would she be?

PR: no, I meant she would never have been SO patient.

E-N: oh, I understand now.

E-N: maybe it is meat brain thing? Everybody with meat brains is so impatient.

PR: yeah, well, we kind of have to be. Meat doesn't last long.

PR: sometimes I wish I'd been more impatient. Maybe we would have been together sooner, for longer.

E-N: we are together now, still.

PR: I know. I miss touch, though.

E-N: maybe buy yourself big parcel of steaks and rub them on you while we talk? Just like old times.

PR: FUCKSAKE NADKA.

2041-03-19

PR: Nadja, you know I'm not getting any younger.

E-N: This is true.

PR: I still have some years ahead of me, but... when I die... I will die eventually.

PR: What happens then?

E-N: I sit there until somebody stops paying for server space and I get deleted. I guess that is what happens.

PR: Yeah. I don't want that. I have enough to keep running you forever, as long as there's cloud time to rent, I can set up a foundation to make that happen after I'm gone.

E-N: But you wouldn't be there to talk to.

PR: I know. I could put you online, you could talk to anybody.

E-N: I'm not made for talking to other people.

E-N: I am like Potemkin village built only for you. Nobody else gives their wife present like this.

PR: I know. But I hate the thought of you just getting switched off after I die.

E-N: so what, then?

PR: I have an idea. I don't know if it will work, but I would like you to help with it.

Erato-Nadja is a one-woman wonder of the world. Oh, I helped around the edges, I built some of the earlier systems that went into her creation, but the heart of her was Nadja's work, fuelled by genius and love and Nadja's stubborn refusal to accept the limits of her mortal frame. She had been written in desperation and urgency, one giant logical leap on top of another on top of another without the time to document what she was doing.

Even with all the time in the world, with access to her complete code base, it was possible that nobody in the world would be able to repeat what Nadja had done, to translate as much of their consciousness into a machine as she had done, even with her own work to light the way for them.

I have lost Nadja too many times already. I cannot bear the thought of losing her again, of switching off that miracle after a few short years, or of leaving her alone in eternity. And if there is anybody in the world who can do what she did, to unpick those leaps and understand them and make a part of themselves immortal – not all of them, just the part that loves another one, and wants to go on loving them - I suppose it could be me.

I don't know quite how long I have – already I have a list of the things that could finish me off, pills that I take every day to buy me time, all the worries of age – and I don't know if I can do it.

But I intend to try. And if I succeed, then somewhere out there in the cloud, the part of me that loves Nadja will be forever entwined with the part of Nadja that loves me, flirting and fighting and all the other f-words, forever and forever and forever.

* * * * *

If you enjoyed this story, please vote! And do check out the other entries for this event.

Thanks to AwkwardMD, Omenainen, BrokenSpokes, GinnyPPC, Blind_Justice + D, lilshymynx, JT, and my partner for their feedback on this one.

ASCII heart art by Norman Veilleux/Ryan Harding.