🔗 Share this article

It was a moment straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was courteous as he outlined how AI tools helped in the wedding preparations. (A human wedding planner was also hired.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Dealbreakers: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a 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 see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my disdain.)

People always pose the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I hate 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 respond: there are individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Simple ‘Ick’ Becomes a Ethical Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once got 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 seemingly simple tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral decision. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for human connection; isolated, disconnected people discovering 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 think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that personal advantage excuse the wider damage it creates?

How ChatGPT Ruins Dating and Intimacy.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the dating 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, 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 lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider 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 kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I likely 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 spend their time, you know, watching it.

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

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific tasks but doesn’t promote it. In the past six months or so, she states “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 rule against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly serving your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are aligned with yours.”

Additional People Voicing AI Concerns.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple 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 almost impossible to disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

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

A recent friend’s split was especially ugly. She supported one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted 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 process 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 most basic things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares comparable 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.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use generative AI, it made headlines. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and expressing 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 skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes spread widely for a reason: people agree with them.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, similar slop on Instagram. Reports suggested 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 enhance his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|