The setting could have been pulled from a Nancy Meyers production. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of discreet wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This venue is perfect,” I told the groom-to-be. He leaned in as if revealing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”
I smiled politely as this person described using generative AI for the early stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a human wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, though, I decided: if my future spouse came to me with wedding ideas courtesy of ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.
Many individuals have usual romantic non-negotiables. Won’t smoke, prefers cat person, wants kids. Over the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced doomsday have flooded my social media and social conversations, I’ve developed a fresh one. I refuse to date someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any AI tool truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the target of my disdain.)
People always ask the “what if” scenarios. Suppose I use it for my job, but I dislike it otherwise? Imagine if I use it to assist people? How about I only use it as a editing 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.
The phrase “getting the ick” describes that feeling of being unexpectedly turned off. A key aspect of having an ick is not fully understanding why you considered someone’s behavior so off-putting. 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 kneejerk feeling of disgust that lacked any solid reasoning.
But here we are, in fall 2025, and using the program even for harmless tasks such as planning a fitness routine or deciding what to wear feels an more and more ethical choice. We are aware that the power-hungry tech drains our water supply and hikes electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for human connection; lonely, detached people discovering 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 control of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.
OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your personal ease outweigh the societal harm it can cause?
As if it hadn’t 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 suggested they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, opened ChatGPT, and requested for restaurant suggestions. Why get close to someone who outsources decisions, including the enjoyable ones like choosing where to eat? If someone is so unmotivated they’ll consult ChatGPT to plan a first date, imagine how minimal effort they’ll spend six months in.
I just cannot envision forming a profound, long-term connection with someone who regularly interacts with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and perhaps heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, creativity, uniqueness – I probably 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 spend their time, you know, watching it.
Ask yourself if your [dating] choice is truly supporting your future goals.
According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she does use ChatGPT for specific tasks but is not promote it. 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 create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my strike against ChatGPT chumps was too strict. She said no, go forth and judge, though it might limit my dating pool – about 10% of the adult population now utilizes the tech.
“Ask yourself if your preference is really supporting your future goals,” Jackson said. “In your case, I would presume that’s one of your principles, and it’s essential to find someone whose beliefs are aligned with yours.”
Other people experience the AI ick, and not just when it comes to dating. Ana Pereira, 26, lives in Brooklyn and works in sound for various 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 nearly impossible to opt out. Pereira thinks that using ChatGPT “shows such a laziness”.
“It’s like you are unable to think for yourself, and you have to depend on an app for that,” she said.
A recent friend’s split was especially ugly. She sided with one of them after discovering the other went to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor therapy alternative, not their partner, when they wanted to talk about their feelings. “It’s like they didn’t want 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 simplest things [at work].
Richard Barnes, who is 31 and is a marine biologist and restaurant server in Hawaii, is likewise 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 depend on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”
Guillermo del Toro’s statement that he’d “rather die” over using generative AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories rant against the tech warning 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 make statements that are critical of AI in their various industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.
This sentiment is present even among those in the tech sector. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely deactivate, similar content on Instagram. Sources indicated that “cursor resistance” is on the rise, as some Silicon Valley professionals refuse to use AI to write their code.
{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer based in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he enthusiastically used AI in the past to write or punch up his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|
A software engineer and tech writer passionate about open-source projects and AI advancements.
