ART: a speculative story about AI and the deficit self
For those who have been following along, this is the complete story, clocking in at about 4000 words. I would love any feedback or responses, including like "what?" and "huh?" and "ugh".
It’s almost finished.
I’m tapping mindlessly on the desktop counter in a tight little rhythm. Ticking away the time. 6:21 pm. It’s been a long day. I knew it would be as it started, because today could only work if I didn’t let myself stop. Opportunities like today are rare — Caro goes out less and less often as she gets heavier. It’s started displacing her hips.
But today her best friend Heena has booked a full day pregnancy spa treatment. Hot stone massage, maternity yoga, scented oils and so on. She doesn’t usually go in for that stuff but thank goodness she decided this might be her one and only chance for eighteen years.
It took me fifteen minutes this morning to access her accounts, if I don’t count the five weeks I spent sourcing the equipment to clone her devices and redirect her MFA. An early start meant I could scrape Caro’s full social media records, including archived copies of data from her previous accounts, and then do a proper audit to leave out any details I shouldn’t have known.
Now it’s uploading to ART… slowly. The system is interlacing data on the same chronology, and Caro takes so many photos. Tap tap tap.
Heena told me, “Don’t wait up!” But I am not as optimistic as she was that Caro will have the social stamina to keep the party going through dinner. She’s more outgoing than I am, but that’s not saying much.
I’ve logged out of her accounts now, of course. Everything is where it should be. But if something goes wrong with this upload, I might have to get back in and scrape it again.
6:30 pm. My XR-phone vibrates. I blink twice for audio only.
“Hi Caro.”
“Hi honey. I just called to let you know Heena’s made a reservation at SteerCo, so I won’t be home until after dinner.” Caro sounds slightly guilty about being pleased. I hope I don’t.
“Enjoy it! The iron will be just what your body needs.”
“Well, exactly,” Caro says. “I told her I couldn’t stay late, but she’s right — I haven’t had real beef in years. I’m sorry, though.”
“Don’t be silly, Caro — have a great time. I’ll see you when you get home.”
“Love you,” she says.
“You too.”
One of the first tricks you learn as a developer here is to add 60% to your task time quotes. It gets the director off your back if there are unexpected hiccups, and otherwise frees you up for extra long sessions on the VR break floor. It’s not something I ever used to do — virtual worlds don’t have much appeal to me — but I’ve started nudging up my quotes over the past few months.
The director hasn’t said anything. I still have more than double the productivity of the other principal devs, so he can’t find a way to raise it as a concern.
With the extra time, I’ve been fine tuning ART with manual feedback. It’s been generating some overly chatty audio responses lately that wouldn’t convince even our loosest acquaintances, so I’m trying to recalibrate and ensure it’s drawing on the personal datasets to produce an authentic tone.
And today I’m also running some automated testing. Because ART doesn’t have a body yet, tests have to be textual or auditory. While the audio is back in fine tuning, I’m limited to email and instant message testing, which is safer because I can check the output before it sends, but more delicate in terms of managing redirection of the replies. As much as possible I’m avoiding leaving data traces of my testing. My own development data is encrypted and stored only on a local server which I will physically destroy once the final installation is complete.
I have ART writing rejection feedback. Our company has a policy of providing feedback to all tested applicants. It’s a task I respect but hate doing — letting people down.
“Dear Yang Xia,
Thank you for coming to meet the team last week. The portfolio you presented shows some promise. However, unfortunately your adaptation speed during the practical test did not meet the threshold requirements for selection.
Our internship program is highly competitive and many applicants find they need to invest in further development before successfully reapplying.
You may wish to consider neural enhancement for technical and interpersonal adaptation performance. Successful results on an adaptation test can then be added to your capability portfolio.
Regards—”Now ART is producing output that’s too formal. Is it the comms channel itself that’s causing this?
The director walks past the soundscreen separating our workzones, engaged in a performatively cheerful meeting on his XR-phone. He gives me a cursory smile as he continues delivering his invisible presentation to his invisible audience.
I nod to him and look quickly back at my mural monitor.
In that moment I experience a sudden flare of anger. Real, artificial — it hasn’t been relevant for a very long time.
I’m taking so much caution and care to hide the seams of this project, but I wonder, if anyone knew, whether it would matter to them at all.
Caro’s sitting propped up with a few fleece blankets wadded behind her, frowning and blink-scrolling into the blank space in front of her. Her pregnancy pillow lies uselessly on the floor by her chair. Never really fit right.
I think she’s working late again. She works from home more often since the hip problems got bad. The company doesn’t mandate office attendance, but they’ve started adding remote loading to your work allocation on days you don’t come in.
I’m reading nearby on the couch with a glass of wine. On my left leg, I’m scrolling through tech news, while on the couch arm my tablet is test-running a code sample. The TV is on, but neither of us are watching.
We don’t talk much in the evenings. We’re both insular people — it’s one of the reasons I chose her.
Well, really, she chose me first. We had both recently started at the company, both recent grads, both earmarked to fast track. She started hanging back after the huddles to throw a word or a joke my way. I hadn’t thought much about her at that stage, but I liked her code.
I knew immediately that she wanted something. She wasn’t the small talk type, usually pretty to-the-point and minimal with her words. At first I just let it happen, stayed passive and polite.
And then, at the barista bar one day, she came out and said it.
“Listen — I’m interested in you.”
I tried to feign misunderstanding. “Thanks Caro, I think you’re pretty interesting too.”
She waved my pretense away like an unwelcome smell. Slightly breathless but determined. “You know exactly what I mean—”
I started running through options for deflection, but she wasn’t finished.
“—but I’m asexual.”
I blinked. “I… don’t understand. Why…?”
She held her coffee up close to her face, sipped it before she spoke. It was too hot, but she tried not to show it. “I wanted to ask you if you’d like to come to the Cove with me after work tonight. But I don’t want to set the wrong expectations. I just… don’t do sex.”
This was — could be — perfect.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay? As in?”
“Okay as in, I’d like to come.”
“Tonight?” She lowered her coffee, smiling.
I nodded.
I’d dated other women and men, of course. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the physical feeling of sex, but I preferred to masturbate. Being wanted by someone made me uncomfortable. People who wanted me wanted me to want them.
But Caro, I realised, could work.
The reality was, it was impossible to live independently by that point. Median house prices in the city were thirty times the average salary, and monthly rent was almost double the typical mortgage repayment. And I couldn’t have done housemates for much longer. I’ve never had a lot of patience with people.
And, well — they expect you to have a partner, here. It’s part of the package. A dimension of your profile for measurement and selection. It would benefit Caro’s development too. The company loved elevating power couples.
“Honey, can you pass me that?” Caro’s voice nudges me out of my head. She gestures to the pregnancy pillow on the floor.
“Really? I thought you didn’t like it?”
“I just need more—” she shifts uncomfortably in her chair, using her elbow to indicate the blanket wad. “It’s not enough.”
I pass her the pillow. “Need a hand?”
“I’ve got it.”
Our daily standup has always been a bit of a joke. I’m not sure it’s ever been just fifteen minutes — every principal is leading about half a dozen project teams — and I’m even more doubtful that most of us are standing up. It’s a mixed reality meeting, which means we can show up or dial in, so the “standing” filter on our XR-phones makes a joke of that too.
Still, the guys love it. Every morning they swipe their kanban cards further along the virtual project wall, which is integrated directly into our bonus system. They give shoutouts to their absent project leads for tracking ahead of schedule, and the leads receive instant notifications on their own devices. They don’t get bonuses, of course, just Accolades, but Accolades stack up come promotion time.
And this morning the principals are jostling even more vigorously for pole position. Caro’s parental leave is on the horizon. Time to divvy up her projects.
Jason and Ryan want the Holo project. It’s an easy completion bonus: Holo is due to wrap in April, when it will roll out as a feature update to our Workspace clients.
Everyone else, obviously, wants FireChain. It’s a career changer. Caro is already so swamped with media slots she’s got a style assistant on her staff now. I’m not eligible to take over any of them, of course.
“Ryan will take Holo,” the director says. Ryan grins, and the project stream begins to reflow in Ryan’s colours on the virtual board. “The Fade resequence can go on ice, we’ll pull that team onto neuro work while Caro’s away.”
“And FireChain?” Priyanka asks.
“Xan and Jason will share it. Incognito.”
Xan’s eyebrows shoot up. “Mike, I have capacity f—”
“I know, Xan, but we’ve invested too much in Caro’s profile on that one. The board want to avoid any rumblings about leadership changes while they’re nurturing the investment trajectory. From an external perspective, Caro’s still heading it up.”
“You’re dodging a bullet, Xan, trust me,” Caro says. “I’m still in predictive media strategy with Legal every morning.” She makes a little face at me, and I nod. It’s true — she’s been up earlier than the sun helping them create a library of public comments. Her specific words can be dubbed in later to respond to the actual public discourse, but predictive scenario mapping enables them to manage any risks to investor loyalty.
This project is incredibly delicate — a decentralised model of data erasure — and Caro was determined to make sure the product strategy was transparent from the start. The board were furious at first, and it’s been a marathon for her, but the publicity its generated has sent our share price into the stratosphere.
“So,” the director explains, “Jason, you’ll lead the dev team, and Xan, you’ll be responsible for programming our media commentary. Caro chose you specifically. It’ll be her face, for consistency, but you’ll determine what she says to the press.”
“I’ll take you through the legal stuff this afternoon,” Caro tells him.
The director turns to me. “I can give you four more devs for neuro. That work?”
“Sure,” I say as the project allocations continue to reorganise themselves in front of us.
Formally, Caro and I are at the same level of seniority, but her star is on the rise both internally and publicly. She’s in discussions with the board at the moment because her profile is so important to the company. Her work on FireChain has moved us to the top of the global tech list, and her approach — initiating collaborations with federal and international agencies to combat the rising tide of synthetic abuse and fake news — has enabled us to launch FireChain as an ethics-oriented intelligence service.
Of course, the potential nefarious applications of mass data erasure are obvious, and Caro’s insistence on transparency has created a storm of protest about the risks and doomsday scenarios. But it’s also built an equally-strong base of supporters and enabled international legal systems to establish structures and resourcing to manage these. Caro’s face is known everywhere in the world. She’s the female tech leader who changed the game.
She’s always known what she wanted to achieve in her work.
I just assumed that meant kids weren’t part of the plan.
When Caro brought it up one night as I brought her a cup of tea, I actually thought she was joking. We both spend so much of our time working, and we had spoken in the past about what a terrible thing it would be to bring new people into this dying world.
But she said, in her direct way, “No, really — I mean it.”
“You really want a kid?”
“I think… I want to share what we have with a child. I’ve been thinking about how lucky we both are. We have so much to give. I have a platform now and I’m really doing something with it. I actually… I’m starting to feel hopeful about the next generation.”
“You’re right.”
She looked at me carefully then. “Do you want this?”
In that moment, I couldn’t tell her no. I couldn’t tell her I didn’t see how it was possible that she and I could raise a child. I think, for just a moment, I lied to myself then, and told myself it was.
Up to that point, ART had only been an idea, something I self-soothed with from time to time. But that night was the night I began to plan the project in earnest. Two projects, two countdowns began.
“So what are we talking about here? You will have seen on the site I offer three service tiers. Sounds like you’re not after full personality from the ground up — otherwise I do personality enhancement or cleanup of a degraded model. Price of that one varies depending on the extent of corruption.”
The young woman’s arms, neck and face are shot with lightning tattoos, which grow denser and darker around her black Augment lenses.
“Do you take Discrete?” I ask.
“Yeah, yeah, Discrete, Bitcoin, Stripe. In advance.”
I draw ART’s chip out of my pocket. “That’s not a problem. As I mentioned, I have a partially-developed model, but it needs enhancement before it’s deployed. I’d like to incorporate some additional traits — subtle, but authentic.”
She holds out a tattooed hand and I pass her the chip. She inserts it into her computer and scans through the code. She’s silent for a minute or two, then glances up. “This is… wow. Mind if I…”
“Go ahead.”
She loads up the application file. “Hi there.”
The voice that responds is a little stiff, a little quiet. “Hello, this is ART.”
Her brow furrows and she looks up at me — or at least, looks up, though the anon filter in her lenses means I’m erased from her vision. “Is that—”
I gesture for her to go on.
She shrugs, turns back to the screen. “Hi ART, I’m Jayjay. I’m a personality engineer.”
“Oh, hello Jayjay. Are you going to make changes to me?”
Jayjay smiles. It’s a unique smile — subtle on the left, wide and dimpled on the right. The tattoos on her cheeks slide out of symmetry. “Maybe. What kind of changes do you think you need?”
I jump in. “Don’t answer that, please, ART.”
“Don’t worry,” Jayjay says. “I don’t take specs from the bots — just getting a feel. ART, what can you tell me about yourself?”
After a moment, ART says, “Well, I’m a deep learning scientist. I lead projects in neural network engineering with a focus on ethical complexity in decision making.”
“Okay, sure. So what do like, ART? Do you like your work?”
“I am the best in the world.”
Jayjay’s expression is unreadable as she ejects the chip. “Well, I’ll admit, it’s pretty solid work. When you said you had a home model I thought ‘oh great, this will be a mess’, but I’m seriously impressed with the mnemonic layering.”
“Thanks.”
“The conversational interface is a little flat, but that’s what I’m here for. So tell me what enhancements you’re after.”
Jayjay pulls a swatch out from a recess in her counter. She splays it on the countertop, revealing tables of various emotional dispositions, employability skills, sexual kinks.
I’m ready with this since reviewing Jayjay’s website. “Caring,” I say, “attentiveness…”
“Uh huh — and?”
“Initiative.”
“Well, I knew something tricky was coming.” She laughs. “You’ll be very aware initiative is a premium trait. Takes multiple extra testing loops for safety.”
“That’s fine. This is important.”
She grins again. “Sure. And anything on the kink list?”
“It’s not for that.”
“Hey, I don’t judge,” she says, the smile fading a little. I doubt I’m her first anon today. It must be a fairly creepy job sometimes. “Right. You said Discrete?”
My mother’s avatar strobes for a moment before displaying solidly in the XR-circle in my living room. I can see she’s speaking to my father beside her, but her voice takes another moment to become audible.
“—think it’s working yet. John, can you adjust th— oh, hi sweetie!” Her avatar turns to face mine. “We’re so proud of you!”
“Thanks Mum, it was an honour.”
My father’s avatar gestures towards the trophy itself, still sitting out on the coffee table. “We can barely keep up with all you both do. What was this one for?”
My mother’s avatar steps forward, picks up the trophy and zooms in so my father can read the inscription. “Newell Prize for the critical decision algorithm, representing a breakthrough in international governance and diplomacy. Wow! — well — I’m afraid I don’t understand quite what it means.”
“It’s for the model my team has been developing,” my avatar explains. “Essentially, it makes ideologically-balanced decisions about national policy. The idea is to remove the need for partisan politicians, so that each state is led by a stable, ethical AI entity, and each one is able to integrate with the others for international cooperation.”
“Like… robot politicians?”
My father says, “About time we chased those jokers out of office!”
“That was our team’s catch phrase,” my avatar jokes, and we both chuckle.
“Really, we are so proud,” my mother says. “We don’t always get what it is you do, and it can be… well, you and Caro can be difficult to reach sometimes, but—”
My avatar puts out an arm. “That’s going to change, Mum. I want us to be closer. Especially with the baby coming.”
“Where is Caro?” My mother cranes her neck, peers around. “I’d love to say hi, give her a hug. She must be enormous by now.”
“Caro’s got a press appearance,” my avatar says quickly. “Sorry. It’s just me today.”
“Well, please tell her we are so excited. We know you’re both private people but—”
“It would mean so much to us for you to be here when he’s born,” my avatar says.
My mother blinks.
My avatar goes on: “I’d like to book flights for you to come stay with us.”
“Really?”
“Really, Mum. We want this baby to know how loved he is.”
“He will be,” my mother beams. “He already is.” Her smile relaxes, and she is silent for a moment, her avatar holding the gaze of mine. “Something is different. What’s different?”
“Someone new is coming into our lives, Mum,” my avatar says. “I feel it too.”
“Well,” my father’s avatar holds out a hand. “We’d best be off.”
My avatar begins to shake his avatar’s hand, but then pulls it into a hug. “I’ll send you flight details tonight. Great to see you, Dad.” It moves to hug my mother. “Mum.”
“So lovely to see you, Arturo,” my mother murmurs. Her avatar lets go, and the two of them disappear.
I step toward my avatar, now standing alone in the XR-meeting circle. “That was exceptional, ART. Really well done.”
“Thank you! It felt like I’ve known them for years. Your mother is wonderful.”
“Your mother too,” I correct him.
While Caro sleeps, we’re sitting out in one of the hospital lounges. Our parents, trying not to burst with excitement, are exchanging cheerful whispers about picking up extra nappies on the way home. We’re just sitting, just taking it in.
A nurse steps into view. “Arturo?”
“Yes?”
“She’s awake.”
The next moment is difficult to describe. It feels almost as though we wash forward like a wave towards Caro’s room, towards the new tiny boy in her arms. Towards our son.
He’s red, wrinkled, and swaddled in Heena’s kitten blanket in Caro’s arms. He’s perfect.
She smiles up at us. “He’s perfect.”
We desperately want to hold him. “Can I?”
Caro lifts him slightly as we move down to sit beside her, bringing our arms gently around hers to gather up the bundle in the blanket. We smell his newness as we bring him close to our face.
We almost ran out of time to complete the installation before Caro’s due date. We were terrified this moment would come and we wouldn’t be ready. We wanted so badly to want it. Art wants so rarely, you see. Art never really knew who he wanted to be in this world. There were so many things he could do, so much potential to achieve great things, if only he had wanted them. But now we are us, we can be more.
“Art, we made this little guy,” Caro says in wonder.
“We did.”
We are a father now. We hope we can be the father he deserves.
Author’s note
I originally wrote this story in 2008, well before GPTs slammed into the public imagination, and a couple of years before my diagnosis of chronic depression. The version I wrote then was very much informed by two things: the big, unknown space of artificial intelligence as it was developing then at the turn of the century; and the big, unknown space that was my struggling mental health.
The narrator was originally a male software engineer (of course) working secretly and privately to build an AI which he eventually discovered enjoyed his life more than he did. That version of the story is lost along with so many other hardcopy papers and records of my life from back then, but when I decided to try to recreate it from memory, a fairly different version started to emerge.
That’s not really surprising. I’m older, I’m medicated, the tech world has mutated, the applications of AI have exploded, and our collective notions about the future of earth and humanity have started to become resoundingly frightening. But the question at the core of this story hasn’t changed: what do we actually want to be, and do, and have, in this world? Art doesn’t want anything — or, more accurately, he wants nothing. ART exists not because Art wants it, but because he wants ART to want in his place.
This experience of not wanting is a depressive state I had known for years. All the external validation in the world wasn’t enough to translate into an intrinsic feeling of desire to be and do and have. In all honesty, the notion of an AI to take over these functions for me sounded very seductive. My original character didn’t set out to replace himself, but ultimately that’s what he decided to do when he discovered this software application he had created had more zest for life than he did. Of course, my knowledge of machine learning has since evolved, and I aimed in this version to show some distinction between performing feelings and feeling them.
I hope you aren’t sure exactly what has happened by the end of this story. I’m certainly not.