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It felt like a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if revealing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was polite as he outlined how generative AI assisted in the wedding planning. (A real wedding planner was eventually brought in.) I responded politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Red Flags: AI Usage.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my disdain.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. Suppose 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 respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Stance.

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

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate political decision. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point 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 assists you write your grocery list. Does your individual ease justify the broader harm it can cause?

How AI Ruins Romance and Intimacy.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing 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.

It’s hard to picture myself establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes focus and might bring about societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – 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 spend their time, you know, watching it.

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

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular tasks but doesn’t promote it. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has approached 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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. 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 future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

More People Voicing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

The aversion 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 fantasizes about going into 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 “demonstrates such a laziness”.

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

A recent acquaintance’s split was particularly ugly. She supported one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously awful 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 deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I couldn’t 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 similar views. “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 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 “rather die” than use generative AI, it made headlines. 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”. 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 think these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

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