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

I smiled politely as this person described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied politely. Internally, though, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Many individuals have usual relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced doomsday have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my disdain.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What 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 Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, 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 kneejerk feeling of revulsion that lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate political decision. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, 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 charge 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 wider negative impact it causes?

How AI Spoils Romance and Intimacy.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot imagine forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – 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 waste their time, you know, watching it.

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

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has come 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 asked Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is truly supporting 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 aligned with yours.”

More Individuals Voicing AI Concerns.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple 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 almost impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

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

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I could not handle it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for the routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares comparable 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 probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Backlash.

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 warning 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 go viral for a cause: people agree 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 mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Sources indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

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