It felt like a moment straight from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that reeked of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”
My smile was polite as he detailed how generative AI helped in the wedding preparations. (A real wedding planner was eventually brought in.) I replied courteously. Internally, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.
Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my disdain.)
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? 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.
The term “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being suddenly turned off. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked 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 conscious moral act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for human connection; lonely, disconnected people finding companionship or even falling in love 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 think in terms of profit first and people second.
OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience justify the societal harm it can cause?
As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He took out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested 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 lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.
I just cannot imagine forming a profound, long-term connection with someone who frequently engages with a technology that’s weakening our shared attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to spend their time, you know, watching it.
Reflect on whether your dating criterion genuinely aligns with your long-term aims.
According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based relationship coach, she may use ChatGPT for specific tasks but is not promote it. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached her expressing concern 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 rule against ChatGPT users was too harsh. 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 assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose beliefs are in sync with yours.”
Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and does 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 opt out. Pereira believes that using ChatGPT “demonstrates such a laziness”.
“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.
A recent acquaintance’s breakup was especially messy. She sided with one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously 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 continue, 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, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly skeptical. “I am not sure 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.”
When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “prefer death” than use AI tools, it made news. Ditto for, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade 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 skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.
Even, to an extent, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable 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 techies refuse to use AI to write their code.
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