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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 reeked of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this man described using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, though, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Dealbreaker.

Many individuals have usual relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I refuse to date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my disdain.)

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

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Stance.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that lacked any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate moral act. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even falling in love 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 prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual ease outweigh the broader harm it can cause?

The Romantic Problem: When Your Date Relies on ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance lately 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 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 lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – I probably 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 spend their time, you know, watching it.

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

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an evangelist. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has approached her complaining about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

More Individuals Voicing AI Concerns.

The aversion for AI extends beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She dreams about going into 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 are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused 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 dependent on AI to do the most basic things [at work].

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise weary. “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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Personalities and Tech Insiders Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use generative AI, it made headlines. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and expressing 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 respective industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, comparable content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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