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It was a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this man described using generative AI for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I resolved: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have usual relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my disdain.)

I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Stance.

The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly disgusted. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for benign tasks such as planning a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an more and more ethical choice. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, disconnected people finding 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 megarich tech bros in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

Sure, ChatGPT can create your shopping list. But does that individual benefit excuse the collective negative impact it creates?

How AI Spoils Romance and Intimacy.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend lately 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 asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable 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 imagine forming a profound, lasting connection with someone who frequently interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking 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 really supporting your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for specific purposes but is not endorse it. 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 generate everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

Additional Individuals Expressing AI Apprehensions.

Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple 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 almost impossible to opt out. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely 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 turned to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy substitute, 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 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 simplest things [at work].

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares comparable sentiments. “I am not sure if I would think differently 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.”

Celebrity and Tech Backlash.

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”. 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 go viral for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Sources 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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