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It was a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this person explained using generative AI for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, though, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Dealbreaker.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I will not date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)

People often pose the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike 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 respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Minor ‘Ick’ Becomes a Moral Stand.

“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 unseemly. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any clear 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 deliberate moral decision. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; lonely, detached people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual benefit offset the wider damage it causes?

A Romantic Disaster: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

It appears ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A good friend lately told me that she spent a night 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 build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to see myself establishing a significant relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes concentration and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “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 really supporting your future goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an evangelist. 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 asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. She said no, go forth 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 supporting 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 in sync with yours.”

Additional Individuals Expressing AI Apprehensions.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She dreams about accessing 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 lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend 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 went to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I could not manage it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for the routine tasks.

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

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use generative AI, it made news. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade 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 issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes spread widely for a cause: people agree with them.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, similar slop on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

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