🔗 Share this article

The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this person described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I decided: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, 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. 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 respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

When a Simple Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found 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 dislike felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the tool even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an more and more ethical choice. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech executives in control 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 wider negative impact it causes?

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 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 enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to picture myself building a significant bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I probably 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 waste their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is really supporting your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular purposes but is not endorse it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has come 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 rule against ChatGPT users was too harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is truly supporting your long-term 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 aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the ChatGPT Ick.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various live music venues across the city. She dreams about accessing 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 laziness”.

“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 messy breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I couldn’t do it by myself. I was too reliant on AI to do the simplest things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has comparable sentiments. “I am not sure if I would think differently 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 probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Well-Known Personalities and Silicon Valley Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and expressing 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 critical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an degree, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies refuse to use AI to write their code.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer working in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he eagerly used AI in the past to write or enhance his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|