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The scene could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was courteous as he outlined how generative AI helped in the wedding planning. (A human wedding planner was eventually hired.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending 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 generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist 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.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Position.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the program even for benign tasks such as planning a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an more and more ethical choice. 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 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 executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that personal benefit offset the collective damage it creates?

How AI Ruins Dating and Connection.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently 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 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, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – 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.

Reflect on whether your relationship criterion actually fits with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating 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 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 chumps was too strict. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

More People Expressing AI Concerns.

The dislike for AI applies beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

“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 complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor 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 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 simplest things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has similar 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 don’t need to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using generative 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”. 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 believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This attitude exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, similar content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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