🔗 Share this article

The setting could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was courteous as he outlined how AI tools helped in the wedding planning. (A human wedding planner was eventually brought in.) I responded politely. Inside, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Many individuals have standard relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million 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 assist people? What if I only use it as a proofreading tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I respond: there are individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

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

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered 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 simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any solid 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 political act. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; isolated, disconnected people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech bros in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the wider negative impact it creates?

How ChatGPT Spoils Romance and Intimacy.

It appears ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A good friend recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and asked 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 little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “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 relationship preference genuinely fits with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may 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 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 harsh. She said no, go forth 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 really serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your values, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

Additional People Voicing AI Concerns.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various 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 thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a lack of initiative”.

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

A recent acquaintance’s split was particularly messy. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful 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 move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I couldn’t do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the most basic things [at 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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Backlash.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant coverage. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning 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 think these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar content on Instagram. Reports indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

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