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The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this man described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a professional wedding planner.) I responded politely. Internally, however, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my disdain.)

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

From ‘Ick’ to Political Position.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a conscious moral decision. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, detached people finding 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 think in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your individual ease justify the societal harm it can cause?

A Dating Problem: When Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance 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 enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking 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] choice is truly serving your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an evangelist. 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 create 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 harsh. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is truly serving your future 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.”

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

Other people experience 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 accessing her phone settings and disabling 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 laziness”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends recently had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed 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 reliant on AI to do the most basic things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has similar sentiments. “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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Well-Known Figures and Silicon Valley 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 rant against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing 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 skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a reason: people agree with them.

Even, to an degree, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, similar 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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