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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was courteous as he outlined how AI tools helped in the wedding preparations. (A real wedding planner was also brought in.) I replied courteously. Inside, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my disdain.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist 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 people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Political Stance.

The term “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being suddenly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found 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 aversion felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral act. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; isolated, 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 control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that personal benefit offset the wider damage it creates?

A Dating Disaster: If Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

It appears ChatGPT has found a way to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A good friend 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 get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our collective attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – I probably 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 spend their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] preference is really supporting your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached 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 rule against ChatGPT chumps 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 choice is truly serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Additional People Voicing AI Concerns.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, resides 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 almost impossible to disable. 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.

A recent acquaintance’s split was especially messy. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not manage it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for even routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has similar views. “I don’t know 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 Industry Backlash.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade 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 skeptical of AI in their various industries. I think 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 added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

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