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.
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