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It was a scene lifted 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 location is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this person explained using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and party conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I refuse to date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike 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 respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Position.

The term “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being unexpectedly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really 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. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral decision. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich 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 advantage offset the collective negative impact it causes?

How AI Spoils Romance and Connection.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A good friend recently told me that she spent a night 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 build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult 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 engages 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 asking an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your dating criterion genuinely fits with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular purposes but is not promote it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has come her expressing concern 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 strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really supporting your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are in sync with yours.”

Additional Individuals Expressing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

The aversion for AI extends beyond the dating sphere. 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 nearly 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.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I could not manage it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for the routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly 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.”

Well-Known Figures and Silicon Valley Professionals Voicing Concerns.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use AI tools, it made headlines. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning 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 critical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree 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 indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

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