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It was a moment lifted from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if revealing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this man explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Internally, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Dealbreakers: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve developed 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 target of my scorn.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Ethical Position.

The term “getting the ick” refers to that sensation of being unexpectedly turned off. Part 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 disgust that had no any solid 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 deliberate moral decision. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi 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.

OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your personal convenience justify the broader harm it can cause?

A Dating Problem: When Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked 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 little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is truly supporting your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an evangelist. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has approached 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 strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your values, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides 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 disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

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

Two of Pereira’s friends recently had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I could not manage it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for the basic tasks.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Personalities and Silicon Valley Professionals Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use AI tools, it made headlines. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. The same goes for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others make statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an degree, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, similar slop on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies refuse to use AI to write their code.

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