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It was a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet 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 secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was polite as he detailed how AI tools assisted in the wedding preparations. (A real wedding planner was also brought in.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Romantic Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Many individuals have standard romantic non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my social media 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 dominant and thus the object of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help people? How about I only use it as a editing 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.

How a Minor Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Issue.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, 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 automatic feeling of disgust that had no any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a deliberate political act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; isolated, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech executives in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How AI Ruins Dating and Connection.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend lately 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 delegates 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, consider how little 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 weakening our shared attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “productivity” means prompting 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 preference actually aligns with your life objectives.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular tasks but is not endorse 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 strike against ChatGPT users was too harsh. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly serving 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 values are in sync with yours.”

More Individuals 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 disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends recently had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure 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 become too reliant on AI for even basic tasks.

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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI received significant coverage. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I think 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 added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, comparable content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies refuse to use AI to write their code.

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