It was a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I told the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”
I smiled tightly as this man explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied politely. Inside, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.
Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my social media and social conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my scorn.)
I’ve heard all the “what if’s”. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate 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 individuals out there for you. But I am not one of them.
The term “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being unexpectedly turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any solid reasoning.
Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate political act. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction 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 create your shopping list. But does that personal benefit offset the collective damage it creates?
As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A good friend recently 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 get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.
I just cannot envision forming a deep, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means asking an app to recap a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.
Reflect on whether your dating criterion actually aligns with your long-term objectives.
Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. 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 asked Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. 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 choice is really supporting 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.”
Other people get 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 dreams about accessing 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 thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.
“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.
Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a messy breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to sit through any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and continue, which is not how things work.”
Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too reliant on AI for even basic tasks.
Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly skeptical. “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 depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”
Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI received significant attention. 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 issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.
Even, to an degree, 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, similar content on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals won’t use AI to write their code.
{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer working in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he eagerly used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|
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