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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this man explained using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Inside, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Red Flags: AI Usage.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)

People always pose 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? 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 people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Minor ‘Ick’ Becomes a Ethical Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, 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 kneejerk feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for benign tasks such as planning a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We know that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; lonely, disconnected 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 ultra-wealthy tech bros in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual benefit excuse the wider damage it creates?

The Romantic Problem: When Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

It seems ChatGPT has found a way to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A close acquaintance lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] preference is really serving your future goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly supporting 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.”

Additional People Voicing ChatGPT Concerns.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes 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 are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed 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 deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I could not handle it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for the basic tasks.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly 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 shouldn’t have to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Personalities and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI received significant coverage. 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 make statements that are skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people agree with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable slop on Instagram. Sources 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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