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

My expression was courteous as he outlined how AI tools helped in the wedding preparations. (A human wedding planner was also hired.) I responded politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Dating Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have standard romantic dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to date someone who uses 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” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? How about I only use it as a proofreading 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 Minor ‘Ick’ Turns Into a Ethical Stand.

The phrase “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being suddenly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once felt 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 had no any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the tool even for harmless tasks such as planning a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; isolated, detached 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 ultra-wealthy tech bros in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

A Romantic Disaster: When Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A good friend lately 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 enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize 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.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is truly serving your future goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some 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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth 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 really supporting your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your values, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

More Individuals Expressing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in 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 almost impossible to disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a laziness”.

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

A recent friend’s breakup was especially ugly. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted 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 process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not manage it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for even basic work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise skeptical. “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.”

Well-Known Figures and Silicon Valley Professionals Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning 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 cause: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, 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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