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

I grinned tightly as this person described using generative AI for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Many individuals have usual relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? How about 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 Simple ‘Ick’ Turns Into a Moral Stand.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being suddenly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. 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 kneejerk feeling of revulsion that lacked any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the program even for harmless tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an more and more political choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; isolated, disconnected people discovering companionship or even falling in love 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 charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that personal benefit offset the collective damage it creates?

A Dating Problem: If Your Date Relies on ChatGPT.

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 suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed 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 lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

I just cannot envision forming a profound, long-term connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our collective attention spans and perhaps signaling total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – 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 waste their time, you know, watching it.

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

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific tasks but doesn’t 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”

Others Who Have the AI Ick.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She dreams 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 opt out. 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 particularly ugly. She sided with one of them after discovering 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 didn’t want to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for the basic work.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares comparable views. “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 depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Personalities and Tech Professionals Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade 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 critical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a cause: people agree with them.

This sentiment is present even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Reports 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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