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It was a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was polite as he outlined how generative AI assisted in the wedding preparations. (A real wedding planner was also hired.) I replied politely. Inside, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Dating Dealbreaker.

Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my scorn.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. Suppose 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 Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Stand.

The phrase “getting the ick” refers to that sensation of being suddenly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really 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 dislike felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any clear 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 more and more political choice. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and increases 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 scenario as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech bros in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your personal convenience justify the societal harm it can cause?

The Dating Problem: If Your Partner Relies on ChatGPT.

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

I just cannot imagine forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “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] preference is truly supporting your future goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach based in New York, employs 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my strike 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 utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is truly 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 aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in 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 opt out. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.

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

A recent friend’s breakup was especially messy. She sided with one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy alternative, 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 process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I couldn’t do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the simplest things [at 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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using AI received significant coverage. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and expressing 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 various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a reason: people sympathize with them.

This attitude exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, comparable content on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies refuse to use AI to write their code.

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