🔗 Share this article

The scene could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this man explained using generative AI for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I responded politely. Internally, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What 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.

How a Minor Turn-Off Turns Into a Moral Stand.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate political decision. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, 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 bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that personal advantage excuse the wider negative impact it creates?

A Romantic Problem: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance 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 unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s weakening our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, originality – I probably won’t find what I prize 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] preference is truly serving your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she may use ChatGPT for particular tasks but doesn’t endorse it. 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 create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

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

More People Voicing AI Apprehensions.

The aversion for AI extends beyond the romantic sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about going into her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it nearly impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates 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 recently had a messy breakup. She supported one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted 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 continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I could not handle it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the basic work.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares 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 shouldn’t have to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Figures and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using AI received significant attention. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing 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 reason: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an degree, 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 remove, similar content on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer working in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he enthusiastically used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|