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It felt like a moment lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was polite as he detailed how AI tools helped in the wedding planning. (A human wedding planner was eventually hired.) I replied courteously. Inside, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Dating Dealbreaker.

Many individuals have standard relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my scorn.)

People always pose the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Ethical Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that lacked any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as planning a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, disconnected people finding 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 ultra-wealthy 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 individual benefit excuse the collective damage it causes?

How AI Spoils Romance and Connection.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow 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 pulled out his phone, accessed 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 lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to picture myself building a meaningful relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “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] preference is really supporting your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific purposes but is not endorse 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 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 strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is truly supporting your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your values, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Have the ChatGPT Aversion.

The aversion for AI extends beyond the romantic sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She dreams 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 opt out. 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.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for even basic tasks.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares similar 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 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 AI tools, it made news. 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 critical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize 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 content on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

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