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It was a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I told the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was courteous as he outlined how AI tools helped in the wedding preparations. (A human wedding planner was eventually brought in.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have usual relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to assist people? What if I only use it as a proofreading 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.

How a Minor ‘Ick’ Becomes a Moral Issue.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. A key aspect 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. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for seemingly simple tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral decision. We are aware that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and increases 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 plot point as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech executives in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How AI Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently told me that she spent a night 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 get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking 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 difficult to picture myself establishing a meaningful bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes concentration and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I likely 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 serving your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, uses 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 come 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 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 really supporting 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 beliefs are in sync with yours.”

Additional Individuals Voicing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. 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 deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to disable. Pereira thinks 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 substitute, not their partner, when they needed 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.”

Before long, I could not manage it on my own. I had become too reliant on AI for the routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares 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 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 Insiders Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI garnered significant coverage. Ditto for, 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 go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, 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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