- The Cautionary
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- Learning AI #38
Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that made modern AI possible. People call him the godfather of AI. He has spent the last few years warning that the technology could get away from us.
In September 2025, he told the Financial Times that a girlfriend of several years broke up with him using ChatGPT.
She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was. She had the chatbot explain how awful his behavior was, then sent him what the chatbot produced.
Hinton's review: "I didn't think I had been a rat, so it didn't make me feel too bad." He has moved on. "I met somebody I liked more, you know how it goes," he said.
It's a funny story. It's also a common one now.
In June 2025, Wingmate, a company that sells an AI dating assistant, published a survey that showed 41% of people used AI to help end a relationship. Among 18 to 29 year olds, it was nearly half.
What is the best way to tell my boyfriend that I sick of him and don’t want to see his face again?
We talked about AI use in a relationship in a previous post involving Tinder. Editing is fine. Ghostwriting is where it goes wrong.
If you know what you want to say and can't find a kind way to say it, ask for help. "Make this less cruel" is a reasonable request. So is "Am I blaming her for things that were my fault?" A chatbot can catch the sentence you may regret for years.
Hinton's ex did something else. She had the chatbot build the case. The verdict on the relationship came from an AI that had only heard her side.
That's why it bounced off him. A breakup message carries weight because the person sending it lived through the relationship and reached a conclusion. When a chatbot writes the message, the person receiving it can file it as a chatbot's opinion. Hinton did exactly that.
Ending a relationship is hard, and most people are bad at it the first few times. You learn by doing it badly: saying too much, saying too little, or watching the other person's face.
Every hard conversation you hand to a chatbot is one you don't learn from.
There's information in the struggle. If you can't write the message yourself, you may not know why you are leaving or if it is the right time to leave. That's worth figuring out before you hit send.
.Hinton's ex got her breakup. She never got resolution and closure.
Things I think about
Most of your serotonin is not in your brain. About 90% of the body's serotonin is made in the gut, where it helps control digestion.