🔗 Share this article

The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this man described using artificial intelligence for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Romantic Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Many individuals have standard romantic dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I will not date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? What if I only use it as a editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I respond: there are individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Stance.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that had no any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly simple tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious political decision. We know that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, detached people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual benefit offset the wider negative impact it creates?

The Romantic Disaster: If Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

It appears ChatGPT has found a way to make the dating scene even more challenging. A good friend lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to see myself building a meaningful relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes concentration and might bring about societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is really serving your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she may use ChatGPT for specific purposes but doesn’t endorse it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached her expressing concern about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is really serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the ChatGPT Aversion.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for various live music venues across the city. She dreams about going into her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to opt out. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She supported one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not manage it on my own. I had become too reliant on AI for even routine work.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares similar sentiments. “I don’t know if I would think differently about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You shouldn’t have to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Figures and Silicon Valley Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. The same goes for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others issued statements that are critical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Reports indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer working in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he eagerly used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|