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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 reeked of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this person described using artificial intelligence for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, though, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have standard romantic dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine 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 respond: there are individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Political Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, 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.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the tool even for harmless tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction 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 helps you write your grocery list. Does your personal convenience justify the societal harm it can cause?

How ChatGPT Ruins Dating and Intimacy.

It appears ChatGPT has found a way to make the dating scene even more challenging. A good friend lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked 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 consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to see myself building a meaningful bond with a person who often uses a tool that erodes concentration and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means prompting an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is truly supporting your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach based in New York, employs 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 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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly supporting 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 in sync with yours.”

More People Voicing ChatGPT Concerns.

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 dreams about going into her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to opt out. 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 lately had a complicated breakup. 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 didn’t want to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not handle it on my own. I had become too reliant on AI for the routine work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise skeptical. “I am not sure if I would think otherwise 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.”

Well-Known Figures and Tech Professionals Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use generative AI, it made news. Similarly, 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 make statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Sources 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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