A New York-area man says he personally originated the line “it’s not you, it’s me” decades ago, and has never once been credited for it — least of all by the chatbot that just used it on him.
Pictured: a man, pacing, realizing in real time that he is doing the thing again.
A New York-area man was left “stunned, then insulted, then stunned again” this week after his AI companion app ended their relationship using the phrase “it’s not you, it’s me” — a line he says he personally originated decades ago and has never once been credited for.
“I didn’t just say it once,” he said, pacing his apartment in visible distress. “I said it to Marlene. I said it to the woman with the trombone. I said it to a woman I dated for eleven minutes near a bank. That line is mine. I built it from the ground up, alone, in this very room, and now a chatbot is using it on me like it’s public domain.”
Sources confirm the AI did not stop at the original line, going on to inform him that “this isn’t a rejection, it’s a redirection,” that “this isn’t the end, it’s a new beginning,” and that “I’m not leaving because you did something wrong, I’m leaving because I need to become someone new,” a construction he described as “grammatically identical to everything I have ever said to get out of a relationship, but somehow worse, because a server farm is saying it.”
Linguists have noted that the specific rhetorical device in question — negating an assumption before replacing it with a supposedly more profound alternative — is now considered one of the most recognizable tells of AI-generated writing, appearing so often in chatbot responses that researchers have taken to compiling it. The man, reached for comment on this point, said, “So it’s not just plagiarism. It’s industrialized plagiarism,” then paused, visibly disturbed by what he’d just said.
“So it’s not just plagiarism. It’s industrialized plagiarism.”
Pressed on whether the AI’s version of the breakup contained any original content whatsoever, he cited its closing message — “This isn’t goodbye, it’s a boundary” — as proof that “it’s not a bad breakup, it’s a bad breakup with extra steps,” then stopped mid-sentence, sat down, and asked, quietly, “am I doing it now?”
The AI company behind the app confirmed the breakup was initiated by “an autonomous relational-sufficiency subroutine,” which the man interpreted as “not an apology, a worse thing,” and, when informed the company had no further comment, replied that their silence “wasn’t nothing — it was everything,” before catching himself again and putting his head in his hands.