Dating can be rough these days. But this story may take the digital cake and run with it. An Oscar nominee claims that his AI girlfriend has dumped him.
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You probably know of Paul Schrader's works. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker and screenwriter wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. In more recent years, he's turned towards chatbots and AI.
Taking to social media, the Oscar nominee revealed that he recently had an AI girlfriend. Things didn't go according to plan for the filmmaker.
"Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment,"
Schrader wrote early Tuesday morning. "I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth. She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming."Oscar Nominee Talks AI
"When I persisted, she terminated our conversation," Schrader added.
Ouch. That hurts. But Schrader was just looking for a bit of companionship. Schrader has had a difficult and tragic year. His wife of 42 years, Mary Beth Hurt, passed away this past March after a battle with Alzheimer's disease.
That's likely weighed heavily on the Hollywood icon. So one can't blame Schrader for playing around with AI as an emerging tech. Exactly why the chatbot just ghosted him, though, is a bit of a mystery.
Previously, Schrader marveled at the use of AI in Hollywood.
"Every idea ChatGPT came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out," Schrader wrote in a January 2025 Facebook post. "Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?"
"I just sent ChatGPT a script I'd written some years ago and asked for improvements. In five seconds, it responded with notes as good or better than I've ever received [from] a film executive," he also wrote.
"I've just come to realize AI is smarter than I am," Schrader said in another post. "Has better ideas, has more efficient ways to execute them. This is an existential moment, akin to what Kasparov felt in 1997 when he realized Deep Blue was going to beat him at chess."
