AI fake? The ChatGPT boss is getting married – and many people can hardly believe their eyes

Sam Altman
AI fake? The ChatGPT boss got married – and many can hardly believe their eyes

With the breakthrough of ChatGPT, Sam Altman became the face of the AI ​​revolution. Now he has married. And his official wedding photo becomes a symbol for the fake debate.

It’s a romantic wedding photo: with the sea in the background, framed by white floral decorations and a banderole supported by bamboo sticks, a newlywed couple exchanges rings. OpenAI boss Sam Altman shared the image on his private Instagram account and it quickly went viral. And many social media users immediately thought it was fake.

The idea is not entirely absurd. The picture is bathed in a somewhat strange light due to the evening sun falling from the side, and with the blurred sea in the background it looks a little unreal kitschy. And of course there is the fact that hardly anyone represents the increasingly difficult separation between AI-generated content and reality as much as Sam Altman.

“I thought he was marrying himself”

The fact that some people were surprised by the picture may be due to another detail: Altman did not marry a bride, but rather his partner Oliver Mulherin, whom he affectionately calls Ollie. Some social media users openly admitted that they also initially believed it was an AI fake because Altman married a man – although for different reasons than one might have expected. “I thought it was a joke that he was marrying himself,” admitted one Reddit user. “With yourself as a priest.” In fact, the three men involved all wear white shirts and short haircuts. But they only look confusingly similar at most at a fleeting glance.

What certainly contributes to the impression is that Altman’s homosexuality has played almost no role at all in the reporting, despite the numerous headlines about him and his company OpenAI in recent months. “I’m gay myself and have never heard of him being gay,” wrote one user on Reddit. “It’s nice to see that we’ve finally arrived at a world where a person’s sexuality is no longer the most interesting thing about them.”

No secret

Altman had made no secret of his sexual orientation for years. “I’m gay,” he tweeted very dryly in 2017. He had publicly lived his almost nine-year relationship with ex-boyfriend Nick Sivo. He also kept his relationship with Mulherin anything but secret. The two had presented themselves to the wider public for the first time with maximum attention: Altman, holding hands, had brought Mulherin with him to a dinner at the White House.

Like his newlyweds, Mulherin, who comes from Australia, comes from the tech industry and worked for Facebook’s parent company Meta for several years. In an Instagram post, he expressed his happiness about the wedding. “I married my best friend and the love of my life,” he celebrated the moment in a post. Tech celebrities, such as Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Laura Sanchez, also congratulated him there. The newlyweds are already planning a family together: They would like to have children as soon as possible, Altman admitted to New York Magazine in December.

Sources:Instagram, NBC, X, Reddit, New York Magazine