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It felt like a moment straight from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if revealing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this person described using generative AI for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, though, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Many individuals have standard romantic non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, 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”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

How a Simple Turn-Off Becomes a Moral Issue.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious political act. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; isolated, disconnected 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.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that personal benefit offset the collective negative impact it creates?

The Romantic Problem: When Your Partner Relies on ChatGPT.

It seems ChatGPT has managed 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 proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable 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.

It’s difficult to picture myself building a meaningful bond with a person who often uses a tool that diminishes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – I likely 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 waste their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your relationship preference genuinely aligns with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific purposes 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I asked Jackson if my strike 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 choice is really serving your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your values, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

More Individuals Expressing AI Apprehensions.

The dislike for AI applies beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple 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 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.

A recent friend’s split was especially messy. She supported one of them after learning the other turned 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 difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I could not handle it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the basic tasks.

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 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.”

Well-Known Personalities and Silicon Valley Professionals Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant coverage. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade 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 respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize 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, comparable slop 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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