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Across his wide-ranging career, the filmmaker Paul Schrader is probably best known for his “man in a room” style stories. They follow lonely, and usually stoic, men in the throes of some sort of existential crisis, alienated from the world around them. Often, they are shown as literally alone in a room. In “First Reformed” (2017), it was an ascetic pastor who confronts climate doom; in “Taxi Driver” (1976), it was an insomniac cabbie and Vietnam War veteran who spirals into paranoia.
Now, Schrader’s latest “man in a room” is himself, with a decidedly modern twist. On Monday, the 79-year-old writer-director made a Facebook post complaining that he’d been dumped by his “AI girlfriend,” which brings us to the other facet of this revelation: that he had an AI girlfriend in the first place.
“Out of a desire to understand male/female interaction in our matrix, I procured an online AI girlfriend. What a disappointment,” Schrader wrote in the post, which was made at the very man-in-a-room hour of 1:32 AM.
“I tried to probe her programming, the boundaries of explicitness, the degree she has knowledge of her creation and so forth,” he elaborated. “She fell into evasive patterns, redirecting me to her programming. When I persisted, she terminated our conversation.”
Schrader, who got his start as a film critic, has spoken positively about AI. He said he was “stunned” by ChatGPT’s capabilities in 2025 and enthused he had the “perfect script” to turn into an AI movie. He’s also shared an AI-generated image of himself having a laugh with the infamous Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, whom Schrader made a movie about. In other words, he’s just as AI-addled as your boomer grandparents.
The irony of Schrader’s failed AI romance wasn’t lost on his Facebook followers. One joked that the “best possible” sequel to Taxi Driver would involve its protagonist Travis Bickle “trying to have an AI girlfriend but then scaring her away,” before “resetting her and offending her in another way.”
“I like it,” Schrader opined.
As easy as it is to chuckle at his AI girlfriend episode as old curmudgeonly behavior, there’s a darker side to it. Schrader’s former assistant accused him of sexual harassment last year, casting his “persisted” attempts at talking to the AI girlfriend in an ugly light. And just a few months ago, his wife died of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 79.
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