The ultimate irony: his ex used a chatbot to dump the so-called “godfather of AI”
The tech pioneer revealed he was dumped after his ex took advice from AI.
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence, has spent years warning about the risks of the technology he helped build. But in a recent interview, he revealed an unexpected way AI slipped into his own life: it was used against him in a breakup.
Speaking to the Financial Times, the 77-year-old revealed that his former partner took to ChatGPT to help her to put words to her frustrations.
“She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behaviour was and gave it to me,” he revealed to the FT. “I didn’t think I had been a rat [what she had called him to the chatbot], so it didn’t make me feel too bad. I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes.”
This is yet another shocking but not surprising example of how AI is seeping into places it was never really designed for. These systems are increasingly being tasked with emotional and relational debates, creating apologies, drafting love letters, or, in Hinton’s case, writing a breakup message.
This small slice of his personal life captures a larger truth: AI is no longer just shaping the future of work or industry—it’s creeping into our private worlds, sometimes in the most uncomfortable ways. And if the man who helped invent it can find himself on the receiving end of an AI-crafted breakup, the rest of us should probably expect the worst.
AI “will make a few people much richer and most people poorer”
During his time talking to FT, Hinton revealed that he believes humanity should step in now before it’s too late: “Suppose there was an alien invasion you could see with a telescope that would arrive in 10 years, would you be saying ‘How do we stay positive?’” he told the outlet. “No, you’d be saying, ‘How on earth are we going to deal with this?’ If staying positive means pretending it’s not going to happen, then people shouldn’t stay positive.”
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Hinton also said he believes that AI will create “massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits,” adding that “it will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”
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