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

I smiled politely as this person explained using generative AI for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Dealbreaker.

Many individuals have standard relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh 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 target of my disdain.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to assist people? How about I only use it as a proofreading 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.

How a Simple ‘Ick’ Turns Into a Ethical Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like designing a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a conscious moral act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, detached people finding 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 megarich tech bros in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How AI Spoils Dating and Connection.

It appears ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A good friend lately told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a profound, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] preference is truly serving your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has come 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 strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

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

More Individuals Expressing AI Apprehensions.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about going into her phone settings and disabling 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 rely on an app for that,” she said.

A recent acquaintance’s split was particularly ugly. She sided with one of them after discovering 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.”

Suddenly I was unable to do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the simplest things [at work].

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “I am not sure 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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using AI garnered 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 make statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes spread widely for a reason: people sympathize with them.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Reports 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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