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The setting could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this person explained using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my social media and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool 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 help people? What if 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.

How a Simple Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Stand.

The phrase “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being unexpectedly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, detached people discovering 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 executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that personal advantage excuse the collective damage it causes?

How AI Spoils Romance and Intimacy.

It appears ChatGPT has found a way to make the dating scene even more challenging. A good friend lately told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the fun ones like picking 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.

I just cannot envision forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our collective attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your dating preference actually aligns with your life aims.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has approached 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 asked Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. 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 serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose values are aligned with yours.”

Additional Individuals Expressing AI Concerns.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. 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 disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it nearly 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 depend on an app for that,” she said.

A recent friend’s breakup was especially ugly. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to sit through any difficult 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 reliant on AI for the routine work.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly 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 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 Personalities and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning 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 make statements that are skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

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

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