🔗 Share this article

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

My expression was courteous as he detailed how AI tools assisted in the wedding preparations. (A real wedding planner was also brought in.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Relationship Dealbreaker.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

People often pose the “what if” questions. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? What if 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.

From Disgust to Ethical Stance.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being suddenly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once got 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.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a deliberate political decision. We know that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for real relationships; 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 megarich tech bros in control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual advantage excuse the collective damage it creates?

How ChatGPT Spoils Dating and Intimacy.

It seems ChatGPT has found a way to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A close acquaintance 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 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 interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means asking 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 actually fits with your long-term aims.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach based in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an evangelist. 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 asked Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might reduce 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 principles, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are in sync 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, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about going into her phone settings and deactivating 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 are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.

A recent acquaintance’s split was especially ugly. 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 refused to sit through 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 most basic things [at work].

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “I am not sure if I would think otherwise 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.”

Public Personalities and Silicon Valley Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “rather die” over using AI received significant coverage. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech cautioning about “environmental racism” and showing 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 skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, comparable slop on Instagram. Sources 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 enthusiastically used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|