🔗 Share this article

The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was courteous as he detailed how AI tools assisted in the wedding preparations. (A real wedding planner was eventually hired.) I responded politely. Internally, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Red Flags: AI Usage.

Many individuals have standard romantic non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my scorn.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? How about I only use it as a proofreading 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 Disgust to Political Position.

The phrase “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being suddenly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like designing a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a conscious moral act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; lonely, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

A Dating Disaster: When Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

It appears ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A close acquaintance lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal 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 collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, originality – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your relationship criterion actually aligns with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may 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 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 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 assume that’s one of your values, and it’s important to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

More Individuals Voicing ChatGPT Concerns.

Other people experience 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 fantasizes about accessing 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.

A recent acquaintance’s breakup was especially ugly. She sided with one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted 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 deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the simplest things [at 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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Backlash.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant coverage. 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”. The same goes 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 spread widely for a reason: people sympathize with them.

This attitude exists even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, comparable 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.

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