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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this man described using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Use.

Many individuals have standard relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

People always pose the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? What if 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.

When a Minor ‘Ick’ Becomes a Ethical Issue.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully 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. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that lacked any clear 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 increasingly ethical choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; 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 helps you write your grocery list. Does your personal ease outweigh the societal harm it can cause?

A Dating Disaster: If Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

It appears ChatGPT has found a way to make the dating scene even more difficult. A good friend recently told me that she went out 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 consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to see myself establishing a significant bond with a person who often uses a tool that erodes focus and might bring about societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I probably won’t find what I value 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] preference is really serving your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for particular purposes but doesn’t promote it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached 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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

Others Who Have the AI Ick.

Other people experience 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 deactivating AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to disable. Pereira believes 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 friend’s split was particularly ugly. 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 difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to 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 views. “I am not sure 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 probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI received significant attention. 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”. Ditto still for when Simu Liu, Alison Roman, Céline Dion, Emily Blunt, and others issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, comparable content 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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