🔗 Share this article

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

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

Modern Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and party conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I will not date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine 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.

When a Simple ‘Ick’ Turns Into a Moral Issue.

“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 felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that lacked any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as planning a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people discovering 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 prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that personal advantage excuse the collective negative impact it causes?

The Dating Disaster: When Your Partner Relies on ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t 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 lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

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

Consider whether your relationship criterion actually fits with your long-term objectives.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for particular tasks but is not endorse it. In the past six months or so, she says “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 rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes 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 principles, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Have the ChatGPT Ick.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing her phone settings and deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it nearly impossible to opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates 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 friend’s split was especially ugly. She supported one of them after learning the other turned 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 endure 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 reliant on AI to do the simplest things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares similar views. “I don’t know if I would think otherwise 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.”

Well-Known Personalities and Tech Insiders Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 make statements that are skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, similar content on Instagram. Reports indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

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