🔗 Share this article

It felt like a scene straight from a Nancy Meyers movie. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I told the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

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

The Latest Relationship Dealbreaker.

Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a new 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 target of my disdain.)

People often pose the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? How about I only use it as a editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I say: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.

From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Stance.

The phrase “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 instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a mere ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for apparently innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a conscious moral act. We know that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for human connection; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy 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 negative impact it creates?

A Dating Problem: When Your Date Uses ChatGPT.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A good friend lately told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning suggested they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and asked for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to see myself establishing a significant bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes focus and might bring about societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means asking an app to summarize 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 future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for particular tasks but doesn’t promote it. In the past six months or so, she states “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 harsh. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is truly 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 values are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the ChatGPT Aversion.

The aversion for AI applies beyond the romantic realm. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for various live music venues across the city. She fantasizes about accessing her phone settings and disabling AI features on all her apps, though tech platforms from Google to Spotify make it almost impossible to disable. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “shows 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 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 refused to sit through any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to 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 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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Well-Known Figures and Tech Insiders Speaking Out.

Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “choose death” over using generative AI received significant coverage. Similarly, 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 believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

Even, to an degree, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, comparable content on Instagram. Reports 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 based 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|