The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers film. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet 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 discovered it on ChatGPT.”
My expression was polite as he detailed how generative AI assisted in the wedding preparations. (A human wedding planner was eventually hired.) I replied politely. Internally, however, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding input courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.
Some people have typical relationship non-negotiables. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, wants kids. During the past few months, as alarms of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my social media and social conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my disdain.)
People often ask 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? 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.
“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being repulsed. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so unseemly. For example, 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 automatic feeling of disgust that lacked any clear reasoning.
But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the tool even for harmless tasks such as figuring out a fitness routine or choosing what to wear feels an increasingly political choice. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is marketed as a substitute for real relationships; isolated, detached people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a science fiction plot point as it is just the way things go now. The ultra-wealthy tech executives in charge of all this prioritize in terms of profit first and people second.
OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your personal ease justify the broader harm it can cause?
As if it hadn’t done enough already, ChatGPT has in some way made dating even worse. A close acquaintance lately told me that she went out 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 outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so lazy they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how little effort they’ll spend six months in.
It’s difficult to picture myself establishing a meaningful bond with a person who often uses a tool that diminishes focus and might lead to societal collapse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who believes “productivity” means asking 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 preference actually aligns with your life objectives.
Ali Jackson, a romantic coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an advocate. In the past six months or so, she says “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 rule against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. She said no, proceed and evaluate, 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 presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s important to find someone whose values are in sync with yours.”
Other people experience 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 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 disable. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a lack of initiative”.
“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 recently had a complicated breakup. She supported one of them after learning the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy alternative, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they refused to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and move on, which is not how things work.”
Suddenly I was unable to do it by myself. I was too reliant 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 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 rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is probably not that hard. We can make the list together.”
Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “rather die” over using AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 various industries. I think these quotes spread widely for a reason: people sympathize with them.
This sentiment is present even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users hide, but not entirely deactivate, 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.
{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer working 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|
A tech enthusiast and gaming aficionado with over a decade of experience in digital media and content creation.
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