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It was a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this man described using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Many individuals have standard relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my disdain.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help 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.

How a Minor Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Stand.

The phrase “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being unexpectedly disgusted. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a conscious moral decision. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for real relationships; isolated, detached people finding 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 megarich tech bros in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How ChatGPT Ruins Romance 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 suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to picture myself building a significant relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes focus and might bring about societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “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 really 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly supporting your future 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 Share the ChatGPT Aversion.

The dislike for AI applies beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various 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 opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend 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 notoriously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the routine work.

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

Well-Known Figures and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI received significant coverage. 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 issued statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

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

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