I’m Out of Shape. Will an AI Trainer Improve My Fitness?

“I need help getting into shape. Can I use AI as a personal trainer?”

—Sweat Breaker

Dear Sweat,

Nope. The most popular AI tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, can’t actually help you trim down that waistline or make your pecs look plump. Sure, Claude can draft a decent nutrition plan, and ChatGPT can tell you which dumbbell exercises to start with, but basic Google searches could already do that a decade ago. Yet here we both are, in worse shape than we’d like.

I have been getting a bit fat myself; I’m in my thirties and still gorge on food as though I have a teenager’s metabolism. Far too often, I stress eat Taco Bell in the WIRED break room before taking a luxurious, carb-induced power nap. It’s an embarrassingly bad habit, and no amount of annoying AI-powered notifications reminding me to eat right or personally generated workout tips will snap me out of these unhealthy patterns. The responsibility to make holistic lifestyle changes and improve my health falls solely on me. I’m the only one who inhabits this body and the only one who has the power to change it.

Thinking about bodies and betterment, the fact you have an organic life-form at all—a bag of bones you can move around in and use to process the world—sets your existence far apart from these faceless, GPU-powered bots whose only physical form is distributed across the labyrinthine hallways of a data center. Even if bots can make solid suggestions for exercises based on the statistical average of everything posted online, an algorithm doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge about a human’s physical limits. It has never gotten disgustingly sweaty on the treadmill, or powered through a workout a little too hungover, or achieved new performance records by overcoming the fatigue.

You know who likely has? The personal trainer at your local gym. If you have the budget, book at least a couple of sessions right now. A trainer can give you some exercises to do, watch your form, and offer guidance so you can complete the movements in a way that’s safer and more efficient. Even expensive exercise gadgets—with computer vision tools that can police your breathing and count your reps—won’t achieve the same level of motivating social pressure as paying an athletic human to monitor your workout in a room full of other athletic humans.

“I use AI even though I know it’s terrible for the environment. Is there anything I can do to limit the impact?”

—Powered Down

Dear Powered,