Erotic novelist Sophie Gravia used chatbot to break up with boyfriend
The award-winning Scottish author, known for her erotic fiction novels, could not think how to break up with her boyfriend so she outsourced the problem to an AI chatbot.
The 33-year-old writer found herself dating a man who was by all accounts perfectly nice. However, despite his good qualities, Gravia just couldn't find that elusive connection.
'He was a nice person, couldn't fault him in any way but I just wasn't into it,' she confessed on her BBC Situationships podcast that she co-hosts with Christine McGuinness. 'When I was with him, I don't know if he was maybe a wee bit boring and there was no spark.'
As she was struggling to find the right words to let him down gently, a friend suggested an unconventional solution: artificial intelligence.
Intrigued, Gravia downloaded an AI app. She explained her predicament to the chatbot, asking it to craft a break-up message that wouldn't hurt her boyfriend's feelings, essentially an 'it's not you, it's me' scenario.
'They gave me this … text message to write and honestly it was great,' Gravia recalled. She personalised the message slightly, adding names and a touch of Scottish flair, before sending it off last year.
The digital parting wasn't entirely smooth sailing, as the man tried to call her. Gravia, still relying on her AI confidante, even copied and pasted his subsequent text message back into the app, asking for a reply. When the conversation lingered and she felt uncomfortable, she instructed the AI to 'be more firm', which it readily did, crafting an even more direct message.
Although her friends advocated a more blunt approach, Gravia believed the AI delivered a far kinder message than she ever could have. 'AI wrote it very nicely, a lot nicer than me or any of my friends,' she said, giving the chatbot a 'ten out of ten'.
Gravia, a former nurse, burst onto the literary scene with her self-published debut A Glasgow Kiss in 2021, and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of her popular novels. Now, it seems, she's not just a master of fiction, but also a pioneer in the art of the AI-assisted break-up.
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