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It felt like a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

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

Modern Romantic Red Flags: AI Use.

Many individuals have standard romantic dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who uses 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 hate it otherwise? Imagine 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 people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Political Stance.

The term “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being suddenly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once felt 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 had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the program even for harmless tasks such as planning a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; isolated, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech executives in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How ChatGPT Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

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 spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “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 actually fits with your life objectives.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has approached her expressing concern 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 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 supporting your long-term 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 aligned with yours.”

Additional Individuals Expressing ChatGPT Concerns.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does 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 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.

A recent acquaintance’s split was particularly ugly. She supported one of them after learning the other turned 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 endure 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 dependent on AI to do the simplest things [at work].

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is 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 Industry Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI garnered significant coverage. 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”. 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 believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, 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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