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It felt like 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 perfect,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was polite as he detailed how generative AI assisted in the wedding planning. (A human wedding planner was also brought in.) I responded courteously. Internally, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I refuse to date 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 target of my disdain.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? What if I only use it as a editing 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.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Position.

The phrase “getting the ick” refers to that sensation of being unexpectedly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that lacked 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 deciding what to wear feels an more and more political choice. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; isolated, disconnected people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech executives in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your personal ease justify the broader harm it can cause?

How AI Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

It appears ChatGPT has found a way to make the romantic scene even more challenging. A good friend recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed 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 unmotivated 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 deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I likely 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.

Reflect on whether your relationship criterion actually fits with your life objectives.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she may use ChatGPT for specific tasks but doesn’t endorse it. In the past six months or so, she states “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 strike against ChatGPT users 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 preference is truly serving your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your values, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Have the AI Aversion.

Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives 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 almost impossible to opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you are unable to 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 supported one of them after discovering the other went 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 deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”

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

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 differently about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You shouldn’t have to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Figures and Silicon Valley Professionals Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made news. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning 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 skeptical 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 sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, comparable slop on Instagram. Reports 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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