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

My smile was polite as he detailed how AI tools helped in the wedding planning. (A human wedding planner was eventually hired.) I replied courteously. Internally, however, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Dating Non-Negotiable.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my social media and social 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 always pose the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What 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 people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Political Stance.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that had no 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 political decision. We know that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; isolated, disconnected people finding 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.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your personal convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?

How AI Ruins Romance and Intimacy.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A good friend 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 asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to 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, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a profound, long-term connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means asking an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

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

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she may use ChatGPT for particular purposes but doesn’t promote it. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has come her complaining about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to create 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 harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

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

Additional People Expressing AI 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 dreams about accessing her phone settings and deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

“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 messy breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not manage it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for even basic work.

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 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 “rather die” than use generative AI, it made news. 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 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 introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar content on Instagram. Sources 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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