🔗 Share this article

The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was polite as he outlined how AI tools assisted in the wedding preparations. (A human wedding planner was also brought in.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Dating Dealbreaker.

Many individuals have standard relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my social media and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? What if 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.

When a Simple ‘Ick’ Becomes a Ethical Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once got 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 lacked any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an more and more ethical choice. We know that the power-hungry 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 science fiction plot point as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

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

The Dating Disaster: When Your Partner Relies on ChatGPT.

It appears ChatGPT has managed to make the dating scene even more challenging. 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, opened ChatGPT, and asked 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 unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s weakening our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “productivity” means asking an app to summarize 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 does use ChatGPT for specific tasks but doesn’t promote it. In the past six months or so, she says “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 chumps was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly supporting 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 beliefs are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Ick.

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 various live music venues across the city. She dreams about going into her phone settings and deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to opt out. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates 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.

A recent friend’s split was especially ugly. She sided with one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy substitute, 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 process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I could not manage it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the basic work.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has similar sentiments. “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.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI garnered significant coverage. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and showing 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 believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, similar content on Instagram. Reports indicated 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 working in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he eagerly used AI in the past to write or enhance his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|