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It felt like a moment straight from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My expression was courteous as he outlined how AI tools assisted in the wedding planning. (A real wedding planner was also brought in.) I responded courteously. Inside, though, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with 700 million 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? Imagine if I use it to help 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 people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From Disgust to Political Position.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being suddenly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, I once felt 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 disgust that lacked any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as planning a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an more and more political choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; isolated, disconnected 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 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 convenience outweigh the societal harm it can cause?

How ChatGPT Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance 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 get close to someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy 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 establishing a meaningful bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes focus and might bring about societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, 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.

Consider whether your dating criterion genuinely aligns with your long-term aims.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific tasks but is not endorse it. 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 create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I asked Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is really serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

More People Voicing ChatGPT Apprehensions.

The aversion for AI extends beyond the romantic realm. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy substitute, 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 deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for even basic work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly skeptical. “I don’t know if I would think differently about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You don’t need to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made news. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and showing 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 skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

This sentiment is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, comparable slop on Instagram. Sources indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

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