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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if revealing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this person explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Dealbreakers: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my scorn.)

People always ask the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Simple Turn-Off Becomes a Moral Stand.

The phrase “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once felt 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 lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly simple tasks like creating a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a deliberate moral act. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; lonely, detached people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in control 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 collective negative impact it creates?

A Romantic Disaster: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources 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, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “productivity” means asking an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

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

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach based in New York, employs ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “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 harsh. 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 truly serving your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are in sync with yours.”

Additional Individuals Expressing ChatGPT Concerns.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple 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.

A recent acquaintance’s split was especially messy. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously 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 deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

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

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise skeptical. “I am not sure 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.”

Well-Known Figures and Silicon Valley Professionals Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant coverage. Ditto for, 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 believe these quotes spread widely for a cause: people agree with them.

This attitude exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, comparable content on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

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