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The scene could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. I found myself in Oregon wine country, inside a rustic-chic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is perfect,” I told the future groom. He leaned in as if sharing a secret: “I discovered it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this person described using generative AI for the initial stages of planning the wedding. (They also hired a professional wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Inside, however, I resolved: if my prospective spouse came to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The Latest Dating Non-Negotiable.

Many individuals have usual relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an impending AI-induced apocalypse have dominated my news feed and party conversations, I’ve come up with a new one. I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool really, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the dominant and thus the target of my scorn.)

People often ask the “what if” scenarios. What if I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? What if I use it to help people? What if 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 Disgust to Political Position.

“Getting the ick” is what we occasionally call being turned off. Part of having an ick is not really understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. For instance, I once felt the ick watching a man drink a smoothie from a straw. Initially, my ChatGPT aversion felt like a simple ick, a automatic feeling of disgust that had no any solid reasoning.

Now, in late 2025, even relying on ChatGPT for seemingly innocent tasks like creating a workout plan or picking an outfit feels like a conscious political decision. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is marketed as a placebo for human connection; lonely, disconnected 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 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 advantage excuse the collective negative impact it creates?

A Romantic Problem: If Your Partner Uses ChatGPT.

As if it had not done enough already, ChatGPT has somehow made dating even worse. A close acquaintance recently told me that she went out 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 fun ones like picking 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.

I just cannot envision forming a deep, lasting connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Inquisitiveness, originality, uniqueness – I likely won’t find what I value in someone who thinks “productivity” means prompting an app to summarize a movie plot so they don’t have to waste their time, you know, watching it.

Consider whether your relationship preference actually fits with your life objectives.

Ali Jackson, a dating and relationship coach located in New York, uses ChatGPT for some tasks – but she is not an evangelist. 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 create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT chumps was too harsh. 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 serving your long-term 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 aligned with yours.”

Others Who Have the AI Aversion.

The dislike for AI applies beyond the dating realm. Ana Pereira, 26, lives 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 “demonstrates 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 lately had a complicated breakup. She sided with one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a infamously awful therapy substitute, not their partner, when they needed to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want to endure any difficult human feelings,” she said. “They just wanted to process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Eventually, I found not manage it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for the routine tasks.

Richard Barnes, a 31-year-old marine biologist and server in Hawaii, shares comparable sentiments. “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 likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Public Figures and Tech Professionals Voicing Concerns.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI received significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant 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 skeptical of AI in their respective industries. I think these quotes go viral for a reason: people sympathize with them.

Even, to an degree, the people who run the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest added a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar content 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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