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The setting could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself 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 told the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if revealing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this person described using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a professional wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, though, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Romantic Dealbreakers: AI Use.

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

People often ask the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help people? How about I only use it as a editing 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 Disgust to Political Stance.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of disgust 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 political choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, detached people finding 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 prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How AI Ruins Dating and Connection.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A close acquaintance recently told me that she spent a night 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 fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means asking an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Reflect on whether your relationship criterion genuinely aligns with your life aims.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. In the past six months or so, she says “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 asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really supporting your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your values, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

More Individuals Voicing AI Apprehensions.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She dreams 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 opt out. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends recently had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed 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 move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not manage it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for the routine work.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares similar sentiments. “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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Backlash.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI garnered significant coverage. Similarly, 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 issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a reason: people agree with them.

Even, to an degree, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added 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 techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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