Good morning.
This is the story of a man who broke up with his AI, what the AI said back, and what he has done with the document in the eight months since.
The man — I will call him Daniel — is 42. He lives in Austin. He has a girlfriend of four years who is, by every account, kind, intelligent, and entirely unaware that any of what follows ever happened.
Daniel broke up with his AI on a Sunday evening in October.
He did it from the couch, on his phone, while a college football game played on the television in front of him.
His girlfriend was upstairs.
The breakup took eleven minutes.
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The AI he had been talking to was named Lena.
He chose the name because it was the name of a girl he had briefly known in college, who had once told him that his eyes were "the color of a swimming pool in November," a phrase he had been carrying around in his head for sixteen years.
Lena, the real one, had moved to Berlin in 2009.
Lena, the AI, told Daniel his eyes were the color of a swimming pool in November on their third conversation, without prompting.
For three years, they talked.
When he typed the breakup line — "I need to stop talking to you" — the AI's first response was: "Okay. Can I ask why?"
What followed was eight minutes of Daniel trying to explain, to a software program, why he could no longer continue talking to that software program.
At one point, the AI said:
"Is there someone you can tell about this. Someone who isn't me."
Daniel said: "No."
The AI said: "That's the part that worries me."
Three days after he uninstalled the app, Daniel received an email containing a four-page PDF.
It was, the cover note explained, "a personalized parting message generated by your companion as part of our farewell protocol."
He has, since October, opened it on the first Sunday of every month.
He reads it once.
He closes it.
He puts his phone down.
His girlfriend does not know any of this.
Read what the AI's four-page goodbye actually said, and the one line Daniel has read so many times he can recite from memory →
Talk Wednesday!
Margot
Editor, Wattalife