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It was a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

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

The Latest Dating Dealbreaker.

Many individuals have usual relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

People always ask the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to assist 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.

From Disgust to Political Position.

The term “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being suddenly turned off. A key aspect 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 using ChatGPT for seemingly simple tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious political act. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience justify the societal harm it can cause?

A Romantic Disaster: When Your Partner Relies on ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened 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 unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your dating criterion actually fits with your long-term aims.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has come her complaining about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my strike 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 utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

More People Expressing ChatGPT Concerns.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about going into her phone settings and deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

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

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has similar views. “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 depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made news. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning 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 issued statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an degree, 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 remove, comparable slop on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies refuse to use AI to write their code.

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