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It felt like a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers movie. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this man explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Internally, however, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have standard romantic dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my disdain.)

People always ask the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Political Position.

The term “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being unexpectedly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, 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 had no any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral act. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; 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 ultra-wealthy tech executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your personal ease outweigh the broader harm it can cause?

A Dating Disaster: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently 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 requested for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s weakening our shared attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting 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] choice is really supporting your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for specific tasks but doesn’t 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 asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed 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 truly supporting your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are in sync with yours.”

More People Expressing AI Apprehensions.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives 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 believes that using ChatGPT “shows such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused 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.”

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

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “I am not sure if I would think otherwise 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 probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Backlash.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use AI tools, it made headlines. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning 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 critical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes spread widely for a cause: people agree with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Reports 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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