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The setting could have been taken from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I told the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if sharing a confidential detail: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

My smile was polite as he detailed how AI tools helped in the wedding planning. (A real wedding planner was also hired.) I responded courteously. Inside, though, I decided: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Relationship Non-Negotiable.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media 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 countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my disdain.)

People often pose the “what if” questions. What if I use it for my job, but I hate it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? What if I only use it as a proofreading 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 Disgust to Political Stance.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. Part of having an ick is not fully understanding why you found someone’s behavior so unseemly. For instance, I once got the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. At first, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any solid reasoning.

But here we are, in autumn 2025, and using the program even for harmless tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an more and more ethical choice. We know that the energy-intensive tech depletes our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for human connection; isolated, detached people finding companionship or even developing feelings with code is not as much a sci-fi plot point as it is just the way things go now. The megarich 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 benefit excuse the collective negative impact it causes?

A Romantic Problem: When Your Date Relies on ChatGPT.

As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently told me that she spent a night with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened 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, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.

It’s hard to see myself establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who consistently uses a tool that erodes concentration and might bring about societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, 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] choice is truly supporting your long-term goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for particular purposes but doesn’t endorse 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 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 harsh. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now uses the tech.

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

Others Who Have the ChatGPT Ick.

The aversion for AI extends 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 going into her phone settings and deactivating 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 laziness”.

“It’s like you can’t think for yourself, and you have to rely on an app for that,” she said.

A recent friend’s breakup was particularly messy. She supported one of them after learning the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously awful 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 move on, which is not how things work.”

Suddenly I was unable to do it by myself. I was too dependent on AI to do the most basic things [at work].

Richard Barnes, who is 31 and works as a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is similarly skeptical. “I don’t know if I would think differently 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.”

Public Figures and Tech Professionals Speaking Out.

When director Guillermo del Toro said he would “rather die” than use AI tools, it made news. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning 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 critical of AI in their various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.

This attitude is present even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added 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 professionals won’t use AI to write their code.

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