🔗 Share this article

It was a moment lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was courteous as he outlined how AI tools helped in the wedding planning. (A real wedding planner was also hired.) I replied politely. Internally, though, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. 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 social conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)

People always ask the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to help 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.

When a Simple Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Stand.

The term “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being unexpectedly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate moral act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction scenario 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.

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

How AI Ruins Dating and Intimacy.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend lately 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 outsources decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult 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 weakening our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “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] choice is really supporting your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has come her complaining 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 rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

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

Additional Individuals Voicing AI Concerns.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She dreams 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 disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows 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.

A recent acquaintance’s split was particularly messy. She sided with one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor 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 deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not handle it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the basic tasks.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares similar views. “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.”

Celebrity and Industry Backlash.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 skeptical 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 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.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer based in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he enthusiastically used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|