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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I remarked to the future groom. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I smiled politely as this person explained using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I replied courteously. Inside, however, I resolved: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

Modern Dating Dealbreakers: AI Usage.

Some people have common relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my social media and party conversations, I’ve come up with a fresh one. I refuse to date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my scorn.)

People always ask the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What 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.

When a Minor ‘Ick’ Turns Into a Moral Stand.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, I once felt 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 clear reasoning.

But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for benign tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly ethical choice. We know that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, detached people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a science fiction 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 create your shopping list. But does that individual advantage offset the wider damage it creates?

How AI Spoils Dating and Connection.

It appears ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A close acquaintance recently 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 get close to someone who delegates decisions, including the fun ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to picture myself establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Inquisitiveness, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I prize 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 genuinely fits with your life aims.

Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has come her expressing concern 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 users was too strict. She said no, go forth and evaluate, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your choice is truly supporting your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your values, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Aversion.

The aversion for AI extends beyond the romantic sphere. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does sound for various 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 nearly impossible to disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a lack of initiative”.

“It’s like you are unable to 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 went to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy alternative, 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 continue, which is not how things work.”

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

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly weary. “I don’t know 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.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 issued statements that are skeptical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who power 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 slop on Instagram. Reports indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley techies refuse to use AI to write their code.

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