‘Taxi Driver’ screenwriter Paul Schrader says AI girlfriend dumped him

Paul Schrader, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” went public this week with an unusual experiment: He tried dating an artificial intelligence chatbot — and got rejected.

Mr. Schrader revealed the episode in a Facebook post, writing that he had “procured an online AI girlfriend” out of a desire to better understand how men and women interact in a technology-saturated world. The experiment, he said, did not go as planned. 

“I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth,” Mr. Schrader wrote. “She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.”

The post drew wide attention online, owing in part to its timing. Mr. Schrader’s Facebook dispatch came less than two months after his wife, actress Mary Beth Hurt, died of Alzheimer’s disease at age 79. The couple had been married for more than 42 years. Hurt, who earned three Tony nominations over a distinguished stage career and appeared in films including “The World According to Garp” and Martin Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence,” died March 28 at an assisted living facility in New York City. 

At least one Facebook commenter found a silver lining in Mr. Schrader’s misadventure, suggesting a “Taxi Driver” sequel in which Travis Bickle “tries to have an AI girlfriend but then keeps scaring her away. Then resetting her and offending her in another way.” Mr. Schrader replied simply: “I like it.” 

The 79-year-old filmmaker has been openly exploring artificial intelligence for some time. In a Facebook post shortly before the AI girlfriend episode, Mr. Schrader said he had sent ChatGPT a script he had written years ago and asked for improvements. In roughly five seconds, he wrote, the program returned notes “as good or better than I’ve ever received” from a film executive. He has also stated publicly that he has “come to realize that AI is smarter than I am.” 

Mr. Schrader had separately praised Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her” — about a man who falls in love with an AI voice assistant — as even more relevant now than when it was released, calling it a film that “grows in stature.” 

Mr. Schrader’s Hollywood career spans more than five decades. He first gained widespread recognition as the screenwriter of Mr. Scorsese’s 1976 classic “Taxi Driver” and later collaborated with him on “Raging Bull,” “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Bringing Out the Dead.” He received an Academy Award nomination in 2019 for best original screenplay for his film “First Reformed,” which he also directed.