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It was a moment straight from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this person explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Internally, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Many individuals have usual relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my disdain.)

People always ask the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Political Stance.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious political decision. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; isolated, disconnected people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech executives in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your individual ease justify the broader harm it can cause?

How AI Spoils Dating and Connection.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance 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 requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to picture myself building a meaningful bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, 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.

Consider whether your dating preference genuinely fits with your life objectives.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses 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 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 asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. 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 deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it nearly impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

A recent friend’s breakup was particularly ugly. She supported one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to 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 comparable views. “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 probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made headlines. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and showing 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 critical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes go viral for a cause: people agree 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 mute, but not entirely remove, comparable 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.

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