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It felt like a moment lifted from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if revealing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this man described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied politely. Internally, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Many individuals have usual romantic non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and party conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to assist people? How about I only use it as a editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I say: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Minor ‘Ick’ Becomes a Moral Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that had no any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, detached people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich 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 convenience justify the broader harm it can cause?

How AI Spoils Romance and Intimacy.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the dating scene even more challenging. A good friend 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 requested for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to see myself building a meaningful relationship with a person who often uses a tool that diminishes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Reflect on whether your dating criterion genuinely aligns with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific tasks but is not promote it. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has come 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 strike against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. 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 serving 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 aligned with yours.”

More Individuals Voicing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

Other people get 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 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 laziness”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to depend 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 went 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 endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the simplest 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.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

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 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 issued statements that are critical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes spread widely for a cause: 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 remove, comparable 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.

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