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The scene could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was polite as he detailed how generative AI helped in the wedding planning. (A real wedding planner was also hired.) I replied politely. Internally, however, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Red Flags: AI Usage.

Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants 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 see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my disdain.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to assist 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 Simple Turn-Off Becomes a Moral Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. Part of having an ick is not fully 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.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We are aware 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 finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech executives in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that personal advantage offset the wider negative impact it causes?

How ChatGPT Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

It seems ChatGPT has found a way 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 suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated 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 shared attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is really supporting your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating 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 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 rule 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 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 beliefs are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Have the AI Aversion.

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 nearly impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

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

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She supported one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had become too reliant on AI for even basic tasks.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “I am not sure 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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Figures and Silicon Valley Professionals Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use generative AI, it made headlines. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and expressing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. Ditto still for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others issued statements that are critical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize 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 techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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