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It was a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this person explained using generative AI for the early stages of planning the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Inside, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have standard relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms 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 uses ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine 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.

How a Minor ‘Ick’ Becomes a Moral Issue.

The phrase “getting the ick” describes that sensation of being unexpectedly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of revulsion that lacked any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even using ChatGPT for apparently simple tasks like designing a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a deliberate political act. We know that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, 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 megarich tech executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

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

How ChatGPT Ruins Dating and Intimacy.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance lately 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 get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to picture myself establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who often uses a tool that diminishes concentration and might lead to societal collapse. 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.

Ask yourself if your [dating] preference is really serving your long-term goals.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, employs 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 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 strike 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 preference is really serving your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your values, and it’s essential 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, resides in Brooklyn and works in sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing 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 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 lately had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and continue, 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 don’t know 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.”

Celebrity and Tech Resistance.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use generative AI, it made headlines. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech cautioning 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 issued statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a reason: people agree with them.

This attitude exists even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, similar slop 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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