It was a moment straight from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that reeked of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”
My smile was courteous as he outlined how generative AI assisted in the wedding preparations. (A human wedding planner was eventually hired.) I responded politely. Internally, though, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.
Contemporary Dating Red Flags: Artificial Intelligence Usage.
Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an impending AI-induced doomsday have dominated my social media and party conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I will not see 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 pose the “what if” scenarios. What if 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 editing tool – I’d never use it to “write” anything. To all that I respond: there are people out there for you. But I am not one of them.
From ‘Ick’ to Ethical Stance.
The phrase “getting the ick” refers to that feeling of being suddenly disgusted. A key aspect of having an ick is not really understanding why you found 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 simple ick, a automatic feeling of revulsion 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 deciding what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech depletes our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a substitute for human connection; isolated, detached people finding companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.
OK, so ChatGPT helps you write your grocery list. Does your individual ease outweigh the broader harm it can cause?
A Dating Problem: When Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.
It seems ChatGPT has found a way to make the dating scene even more challenging. A good friend 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 get close to someone who delegates decisions, including the enjoyable ones like picking where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll hit up ChatGPT to plan a first date, consider how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.
I just cannot envision forming a profound, long-term connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s weakening our collective attention spans and possibly signaling total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, originality – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who believes “productivity” means prompting 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 supporting your future goals.
Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for certain tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she says “every one” of her clients has approached 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 inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT users was too strict. She said no, proceed and judge, though it might reduce my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.
“Ask yourself if your choice is really serving 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 values are aligned with yours.”
Others Who Share the ChatGPT Aversion.
Other people get the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, resides in Brooklyn and does sound for multiple live music venues across the city. She dreams about accessing 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 believes that using ChatGPT “shows 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 especially messy. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any uncomfortable human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to deal with something and move on, which is not how things work.”
Eventually, I found not handle it on my own. I had grown too dependent on AI for even routine tasks.
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 otherwise about someone who uses ChatGPT, but I would be like, ‘come on,’” he said. “You shouldn’t have to rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”
Celebrity and Tech Backlash.
Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade against the tech warning about “environmental racism” and expressing 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 respective industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a cause: people sympathize with them.
This attitude is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users turn off AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely remove, comparable slop on Instagram. Reports suggested that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.
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