🔗 Share this article

It was a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was courteous as he detailed how AI tools assisted in the wedding planning. (A real wedding planner was eventually hired.) I replied courteously. Inside, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Relationship Dealbreaker.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program 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”. 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 editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I say: there are individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Ethical Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, 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 kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate moral act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, detached people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction scenario as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech bros in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the collective negative impact it causes?

How ChatGPT Ruins Dating and Intimacy.

As if it had not 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 suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources 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 little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to picture myself establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who often uses a tool that erodes concentration and might bring about societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I value 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 serving your future goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. In the past six months or so, she says “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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really supporting your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Have the ChatGPT Aversion.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the romantic sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about going into 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 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 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 needed 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.”

Eventually, I could not handle it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for the routine work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise weary. “I am not sure if I would think otherwise 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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Well-Known Personalities and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

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 cautioning 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 issued statements that are critical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a cause: people agree with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Reports 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|