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It felt like a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers movie. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

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

The New Dating Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have usual romantic non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to assist people? How about 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 Disgust to Political Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like designing a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a conscious political decision. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for human connection; isolated, detached people discovering companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point 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 generate your shopping list. But does that individual benefit offset the wider negative impact it causes?

A Romantic Problem: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A good friend recently 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 asked for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider 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 weakening our collective attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, originality – I likely 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.

Consider whether your dating preference genuinely fits with your long-term aims.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an advocate. 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 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, go forth and evaluate, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really serving your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the ChatGPT Aversion.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the dating sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various 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 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 particularly messy. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I could 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 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 shouldn’t have to depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made news. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 believe 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 hide, but not entirely deactivate, comparable slop on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.

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