🔗 Share this article

It felt like a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this man explained using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Romantic Dealbreakers: AI Use.

Many individuals have standard relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

People often ask the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? How about I only use it as a editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I say: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Minor Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Issue.

The term “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being suddenly turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that lacked any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for harmless tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, detached people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction scenario as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech bros in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your personal convenience justify the broader harm it can cause?

How AI Spoils Romance and Intimacy.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A good friend recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s weakening our shared attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means prompting an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Reflect on whether your dating criterion genuinely aligns with your life aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular purposes but is not promote 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 create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I asked Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

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

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She dreams about accessing her phone settings and deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it nearly impossible to disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows 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.

A recent acquaintance’s breakup was particularly messy. She sided with one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for even basic work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly skeptical. “I don’t know if I would think differently about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You don’t need to rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use AI tools, it made headlines. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. Ditto still for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others make statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.

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

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