Page 82 of The Love Hack

So what should you do? Come clean, mate. Tell your wife what you’ve been up to and beg for her forgiveness. If you’re lucky, you’ll get it – but most likely you won’t, and I can’t say I blame your wife one bit for that.

Then, take a long, hard look at yourself. Why are you so blind to what really matters in relationships and in life? Did you have a distant father growing up? Quite possibly you’d benefit from some counselling – if you go down that route, put the work in with honesty and pragmatism.

As for the other woman, end it. She doesn’t deserve you – and not in the way you think.

And moving forward, do try to stop being such a dick.

Yours ever, Adam

The journey to Brooklyn seemed to take forever – actually, it did take forever, because instead of waiting for Ross, whose superior knowledge of the subway would have ensured we got an express train, I dragged him on to the first one that arrived and it stopped absolutely everywhere. In spite of the freezing air conditioning, I could feel sweat trickling down my back and soaking into my top, and the hand Ross was holding got so clammy I had to wriggle it free after a few minutes.

There was no point putting him off me before we’d even started, after all.

He asked several times before eventually giving up, ‘What’s going on? What did Greg say?’

But all I could answer was, ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand. I need to check my laptop.’

So, when at last we arrived at the apartment, that was the first thing I did. I perched on the bed – which to my shame I hadn’t got around to making that morning, and my clothes were scattered everywhere, too – while he poured us glasses of water from the tap. I opened my laptop with trembling hands and tapped through to my email.

And there it was – the answer I’d sent through to the subs’ desk in the small hours of the morning, in response to the email I was sure had come from Zack.

Feeling like I was about to throw up, I opened my browser window. The Max! homepage was right there in the first tab, same as it always was. I hit Refresh and the new Ask Adam column appeared right at the top of the screen. I felt even sicker – normally it was about halfway down, below the news coverage and the sport, but above Neil’s weekly financial advice segment.

I passed the laptop to Ross.

‘Read that,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

He looked like he might be about to make some kind of a joke, but changed his mind, balanced the computer on his knees and tapped the trackpad. The text appeared on the screen, but I couldn’t look at it. I heard Ross take a sharp breath in, then hiss it out slowly through his teeth. Then he chuckled. Then I felt the warm weight of the laptop on my thighs..

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s hot stuff.’

‘Is it…’ I tapped the email window and opened the attachment I’d sent the previous day, unable to make myself read it. ‘Is it this?’

Ross leaned over to peer over my shoulder. I could feel his breath on my neck, tickling my hair, and smell his skin. He smelled a whole lot better than anyone who’d caught an overnight flight from London and been walking the streets of New York ever since had any right to.

‘Looks like the subs changed a few words here and there,’ he said. ‘Made it more Adam-like. The original’s kind of stilted, like you wrote it in a hurry, so I guess they had more heavy lifting to do than usual. But it’s – I mean, it’s pretty punchy, right? Well done you.’

‘Here’s the thing.’ My lips felt so numb I could barely get the words out. ‘I didn’t write that.’

‘What? Then who did?’

‘GenBot 2.0. I think.’

‘You think? Surely you must’ve told it what to write?’

In a rush, I explained what had happened. How overwhelmed I’d felt by the increased frequency of my deadlines. How I hadn’t known how to respond to the letter, because I thought it was from Amelie’s husband. How I’d been using GenBot to help me compose answers when I was stuck. How I’d remembered my overdue copy late at night and pasted the answer before sending it without checking it properly.

‘But it wouldn’t come up with this on its own.’ Ross’s brow was furrowed. ‘I mean, it’s done a decent job of copying Adam’s style, which is pretty impressive given the column’s only been running a couple of months. They must have updated the algorithm quite recently. But the content – it’s dynamite. It’s not like anything we’ve ever got from the AI when we’ve used it for research before.’

“I’ve been arguing with it,’ I confessed. ‘When I don’t like what it writes, because it’s too kind of boring. I’ve been asking it follow-on questions and why it’s not telling these men what dicks they are and stuff like that. And now it’s gone rogue.’

‘It’s a piece of software, Lucy. It can’t go rogue. You’ve trained it.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve trained the algorithm. When you didn’t accept the responses it gave, you made it change them, and it’s learned. That’s how these things work.’

Ross wasn’t the only one who understood technology. I did too, and I knew he was right. I’d wanted the AI Adam to give answers that the real Adam – that I – couldn’t. And now it had. And I hadn’t checked my copy and it had gone live and it was all my fault.

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