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It felt like a scene straight 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 perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled tightly as this man explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a professional wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Inside, though, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Dealbreaker.

Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my disdain.)

People often pose the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate 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 Political Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully 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. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 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 drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; 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 ultra-wealthy tech executives in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the wider damage it creates?

The Dating Problem: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A close acquaintance lately told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated 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, long-term connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, 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 actually fits 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 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 strict. She said no, proceed and evaluate, 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 presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Have the AI Ick.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing her phone settings and deactivating 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 can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

A recent friend’s breakup was particularly messy. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy alternative, 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.”

Eventually, I found not handle it on my own. I had become too reliant on AI for even basic work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “I don’t know 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 declaration that he’d “rather die” over using AI garnered significant attention. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and expressing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. The same goes 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.

This sentiment exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, similar slop 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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