🔗 Share this article

The setting could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close 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.”

I grinned tightly as this person described using generative AI for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also hired a human wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, though, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding input from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Dating Dealbreaker.

Some people have typical relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have dominated my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with 700 million weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the object 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 assist people? How about 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.

How a Minor Turn-Off Turns Into a Moral Stand.

The term “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being suddenly disgusted. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a mere ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion that had no any clear reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like designing a workout plan or selecting an outfit feels like a deliberate political act. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; isolated, detached 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 control of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience outweigh the broader harm it can cause?

A Dating Problem: When Your Date Relies on ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A good friend lately told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why build a relationship with someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how little effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s difficult to see myself establishing a meaningful bond with a person who consistently uses a tool that diminishes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I probably won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “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] choice is really serving your future goals.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, employs ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she states “every one” of her clients has approached 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 asked Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

“Ask yourself if your preference is really supporting your long-term goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would assume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose values are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the ChatGPT Aversion.

The dislike for AI applies beyond the romantic realm. 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 nearly 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 rely on an app for that,” she said.

Two of Pereira’s friends lately had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously poor therapy substitute, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I could not handle it on my own. I had become too reliant on AI for even routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is 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 shouldn’t have to depend 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 showing fear over users who are “codependent on a machine”. Ditto still 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 go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an extent, the people who power the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar slop on Instagram. Sources indicated 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 eagerly used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|