Chapter 16
At home that night, Astro and I had a working dinner. At least, he tried to eat the scrambled eggs off my plate and I tried to work.
My meeting with Greg had jolted me. I knew he hadn’t meant it to – I knew he’d meant to soften the blow of Ask Adam’s disappointing hit rate, come up with a solution, reassure me that if I produced just a little more content, it would all come good.
But I couldn’t share his optimism – if it had even been genuine, which I doubted. The new-found confidence I’d been feeling at my ability to be Adam, to answer men”s problems in a sensitive yet forthright fashion, had been dashed. The numbers weren’t stacking up. I wasn’t doing a good enough job.
I wasn’t good enough.
My heart sank as I flicked through Adam’s inbox. As I’d said to Greg, there was no shortage of material there to work with. Young men, older men, single men, married men. Sad men, angry men, lonely men. Men who seemed to hate women and men who seemed to think women hated them.
There were so many of them. They all needed my help, and right now it felt like I couldn’t even help myself. Back when I’d embarked on this crazy scheme, I’d had Amelie as back-up, but now I couldn’t even turn to her.
‘Come on, Lucy,’ I said aloud, repeating Greg’s words to myself, ‘You’ve got this.’
I opened the document where I’d saved the anonymous letter Adam had received earlier. At the time, it had seemed straightforward to answer. But now, my self-belief at rock bottom, I had no idea how to respond to whoever he was.
End things with the girlfriend, don’t end things? Hold out for someone you feel really passionate about, settle for someone you think is good enough. What was the right answer? Two people’s happiness could depend on what I decided to write – and never mind that, there were scores of other men whose problems hung in the same balance.
‘I don’t know if I can do this, Astro,’ I said.
Astro blinked slowly at me, his eyes like amber traffic lights.
And then I remembered Nush’s hissed aside during Zack’s wedding speech, telling me that he’d got GenBot 2.0 to write it for him, and how that had made me feel – not shocked, exactly, but kind of let down and disappointed that he couldn’t have been bothered to do it himself, but had used a generative chat algorithm to do it for him. It was his wedding reception, after all. He literally had one job.
I literally had one job, too. Right now, though, I didn’t feel like I could do it.
You can’t get artificial intelligence to write Adam’s column! Part of my brain recoiled from the idea in disgust. It’s cheating.
It’s not cheating. It’s just getting help, same as Amelie helped me in the beginning.
It’s probably copyright infringement. You’ll get sacked.
I’ll get sacked anyway, if I don’t come up with a way to answer these damn problems.
You’ll get sacked in disgrace.
I won’t use it to write the actual answers. I’ll just ask it to give me a steer. It’s no different from getting a steer from Chiraag before I answered Mark’s letter.
It’s lots different.
But I opened GenBot 2.0 anyway. I knew what it was, of course – I even understood the technology behind it, because I’d researched it back in the happier days when I’d been technology editor of Fab!. I’d written an article about five ways it could help Fab!’s readers in their daily lives – from composing tricky letters to their line managers to highlighting the top summer fashion trends.
I knew it was a generative language-based chatbot, which had been trained on a vast input of text which it drew upon to produce language of its own. I had a vague idea that it could be trained still further by its users asking it follow-on questions that would refine the output it gave not only to them, but to other users asking it similar questions. I’d delved into the theory behind how it worked – I vaguely recalled a load of stuff about machine learning, reward models and something called Proximal Policy Optimization, which I’d attempted to get my head around at the time but certainly couldn’t understand now.
But, although I’d tinkered about with it a bit, just to make sure it could do what I was saying it could, I’d never actually used the technology in my own work. I hadn’t needed to – until today.
I wasn’t going to feed any of Adam’s readers’ queries to the bot, I decided. There were probably terrible confidentiality implications of doing so, I thought, imagining Adam’s readers discovering that their anguished words had been used to train a bot, suing Max! for plagiarism, and me losing my job and ending up back where I’d been a few weeks before, facing homelessness and penury.
I wouldn’t use their actual words, I decided. I’d do a kind of summary. Just to see how it worked.
At the bottom of my screen was a small, horizontal window. In it, I began typing.
I’m not sure if I’m really into my girlfriend.
Adam’s anonymous correspondent hadn’t actually referred to the woman he was seeing as his girlfriend, but I figured that was acceptable shorthand for someone you’d been on a few dates with and were, to be old-fashioned about it, sleeping with. I mean, come on. She was a girl, and you don’t actually sleep with mere acquaintances, do you? Well, I supposed some people do, if I thought about it.
I like her, but I think she likes me more and I don’t know if it’s fair to carry on seeing her. What should I do?
At the top of the screen, a black cursor blinked a few times. Clearly, the AI was giving my question some hard thought. Then, rapidly, words began to appear below it.
Choosing whether to continue a relationship is always a difficult decision. Your happiness, as well as that of the other person, are at stake here, and decisions shouldn’t be made rashly. Here are some points for you to consider before you reach a conclusion.
So far, so diplomatic. I was impressed – especially when I read on. The bot had come up with no fewer than eight separate steps its correspondent might take in the course of his reflection, from considering what he really wanted in a relationship (‘a deeper connection, or something else’, which I took to be PG-speak for no-strings sex), to turning to friends and family for deeper insight into his situation, to – obviously – having a conversation with the girl herself to try and discover whether their needs and priorities were aligned.
Remember, each relationship is unique, it concluded. Take time to think through your options and you will come to a decision that feels right for you and your girlfriend.
‘Damn,’ I muttered. I was impressed. In less than three seconds, the technology had come up with an answer that – while a bit vanilla, if I was being hyper-critical – was right up there with the best I could have written after agonising over my keyboard for the best part of an hour.
Neil had a point – the thing was going to put us all out of jobs.
I read through the bot’s response again. It was good stuff – it could do with a polish, a bit of shortening and some of Adam’s signature wit adding to it – it had, not unsurprisingly, neglected to warn its user not to be a dick. But this was a good start – I could work with it.
I copied and pasted the text into a fresh document, did the same with the original question, and read it all through again.
Tomorrow, I’d give it a final edit and send it on its way to the subs’ desk, just in case there were any finer points of style that had been missed between me and the bot. But the question was as good as answered.
This thing had potential. I could work with it. My life – or rather, Adam’s life – was about to become a whole lot easier.