It’s customary to leave this note until the middle or end of an article, but Gizmodo reached out to representatives of Zach Braff twice for interviews about his use of AI generally: once on December 15 of last year, and then again yesterday. Both requests were denied.
On Thursday, Scrubs star Zach Braff posted a Story to his Instagram account (archived by Megh Wright of Vulture) with the following text:
“I’m not dating a chatbot.
I can’t believe I have to type these words.
It is a storyline in an upcoming ep of Scrubs.
Maybe it came from that?
Not sure.
But not me.
Love,
The guy not dating his chatbot.
Please update all gossip sites.”
Braff’s Story posts on Thursday were more than a denial. They were an ostensible appeal for decency from fellow showbiz types Max Silvestri, Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman, and Kumail Nanjiani, who on December 18—three days after Gizmodo had reached out to Braff’s representatives—had tittered to one another in a podcast segment about an unnamed major actor who was rumored to be romantically involved with an AI chatbot. The anonymous actor in question was supposedly so bold about his relationship that he was interacting with the chatbot in front of others.
As documented in Wright’s post for Vulture, the rumor had flared up and died down last year, but a repost of the Silvestri-Slate-Liedman-Nanjiani clip popped up on the gossip account DeuxMoi earlier this month, and appears to have been the fresh spark of interest that triggered Braff’s denial.
“Also I had no idea until tonight (because I’m not on TikTok) that these folks were the origin of this?” Braff wrote in an additional Story post, along with, “I feel like now is a good time to be kind to people.”
If the denial was intended to make the topic go away, then its safe to say the consequences have been downright perverse for Braff. His denial of romantic involvement with an AI chatbot has now been covered by:
- Cosmopolitan
- The Cut
- Buzzfeed
- People
- Just Jared
- Entertainment Weekly
- Page Six
- The Independent
- TheWrap
- USA Today
- JoBlo.com (which embellished the story with an illustration)
- The Sun
- Hello!
- Metro
- New York Daily News
- Dexerto
- Daily Mirror
Plus Vulture, and now Gizmodo.
Commenters online have questioned the wisdom of his choice to address the rumor at all given that it was anonymous. Wright of Vulture pointed out that Braff calling himself “The guy not dating his chatbot” could be seen as an unnecessarily intriguing choice when he could have simply said “guy not dating a chatbot.”
12 years ago, during another uncomfortable time online for Braff—that one caused by the surprising amount of controversy over his decision to use Kickstarter to help fund his 2014 movie Wish I Was Here—the star sat for a Q&A with a YouTube documentarian. It wasn’t an especially hard-hitting interview, but some of his statements are worth reading in the present context:
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“I’m on Twitter, and they’re going ‘You read the comments?’ and I was like ‘You don’t?’ and I realized some people just post s— and they don’t engage. I actually love engaging with my fan base and they know that they’re smart. They’re not idiots. They like it. It’s a conversation. It’s not me saying ‘Hey check out my new makeup line,’ and so people can smell b——- a mile away. Look what happened when Morgan Freeman did that AMA on Reddit. I don’t know if people followed that, but there was a huge backlash because it was so clearly a film publicist just writing answers for Morgan Freeman, whereas my AMAs, um, I don’t hold anything back. Ask me…It’s called ‘Ask Me Anything.’ Ask me anything. I’ll answer it.”
Even with this in mind, I am not holding my breath for Zach Braff to do a Reddit AMA right now. If he did, I would read it with great interest.
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