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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this man described using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also hired a professional wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Dealbreakers: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my social media and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I will not date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to help 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 Turn-Off Turns Into a Ethical Issue.

“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 example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that had no any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the tool even for harmless tasks such as planning a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an more and more political choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, disconnected people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point 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 excuse the collective negative impact it causes?

The Dating Disaster: If Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A good friend lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to see myself building a meaningful relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes concentration and might bring about societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, originality – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your dating preference genuinely fits with your long-term aims.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached her expressing concern about “chatfishing” or people who use AI to create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce 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 principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Have the ChatGPT Aversion.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the romantic sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in 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 “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

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

Two of Pereira’s friends recently had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

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

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares comparable 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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Well-Known Figures and Silicon Valley Insiders Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made headlines. 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”. 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 think these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, comparable slop on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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