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The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. 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 ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned politely as this man explained using generative AI for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, however, I decided: if my prospective spouse approached to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Contemporary Romantic Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Usage.

Many individuals have usual romantic dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday 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 generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object of my scorn.)

People always ask the “what if” questions. What if 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 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 Simple ‘Ick’ Becomes a Moral Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, 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 had no any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 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 hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction plot point as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the collective negative impact it causes?

How ChatGPT Ruins Romance and Intimacy.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way 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 pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to see myself establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who often uses a tool that erodes focus and might bring about societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, originality, originality – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is truly serving your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has come her complaining 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 rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is really supporting your future 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 in sync with yours.”

More People Voicing AI Apprehensions.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple 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 disable. Pereira thinks 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 particularly ugly. She supported one of them after learning 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 deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I couldn’t do it by myself. I was too reliant on AI to do the most basic things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, has similar sentiments. “I don’t know if I would think otherwise 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 probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Well-Known Personalities and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using AI garnered significant coverage. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech cautioning 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 various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people agree with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Sources suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies won’t use AI to write their code.

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