Geoffrey Hinton, long considered a “godfather of AI” and who won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, has a complicated relationship with the tech he pioneered at Google many years ago.

He’s long argued that AI poses an existential risk to humanity, and signed a letter earlier this year calling on OpenAI not to betray its non-profit roots.

Even in his own personal life, it sounds like Hinton can’t escape the tech. In an interview with the Financial Times, the 77-year-old revealed that his ex-girlfriend of several years had broken up with him — by using ChatGPT, a product that would have been impossible without his groundbreaking research.

“She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was,” he told the newspaper. “She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behaviour was and gave it to me.”

“I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad,” he added, in his own defense.

It’s a notable admission that highlights just how pervasive the tech has become in everyday life — even for the “godfather of AI” and one of the biggest AI doomsayers out there.

Hinton’s ex is far from alone in using ChatGPT to dump their significant other. Particularly for young people, OpenAI’s uber-popular chatbot has become a crutch during breakups, helping draft breakup texts and even pushing users into divorce.

While a breakup certainly isn’t on the level of a powerful AI causing an extinction-level event, as Hinton has warned of, it still feels notable.

And the University of Toronto professor is still warning that the tech could lead to “catastrophic outcomes.”

During his FT interview, in fact, Hinton said that we should act 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 FT. “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.”

Hinton also argued that AI will have drastic consequences for society, creating “massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits.”

“It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer,” he told the newspaper. “That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

Despite the doomsaying, Hinton admitted that he uses ChatGPT in his personal life, asking it how to fix household appliances, as well as other “research.”

Fortunately, his recent ChatGPT-facilitated breakup doesn’t appear to have fazed Hinton much. The researcher revealed that he had since moved on.

“I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes,” he told the FT. “Maybe you don’t!”

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