{‘It reveals such a laziness’: why I refuse to date someone who relies on ChatGPT|The AI Romantic Dealbreaker: The Reasons I Refuse to Go Out With a ChatGPT Enthusiast.

It felt like a scene lifted from a Nancy Meyers film. We were in Oregon wine country, inside a stylishly rustic barn that smelled of stealth wealth, for a close friend’s rehearsal dinner. “This location is ideal,” I remarked to the groom-to-be. He moved closer as if sharing a secret: “I found it on ChatGPT.”

I grinned tightly as this person described using artificial intelligence for the initial stages of organizing the wedding. (They also employed a professional wedding planner.) I responded courteously. Internally, though, I resolved: if my future spouse approached to me with wedding ideas from ChatGPT, there would be no wedding.

The New Dating Non-Negotiable.

Some people have common relationship dealbreakers. Doesn’t smoke, is a cat person, desires kids. During the past few months, as warnings of an approaching AI-induced apocalypse have flooded my news feed and social conversations, I’ve developed a new one. I will not see someone who employs ChatGPT. (Or any generative AI program truly, but with countless weekly users, ChatGPT is by far the most popular and thus the object of my scorn.)

I’ve encountered all the “what if’s”. What if 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.

When a Minor Turn-Off Becomes a Ethical Issue.

“Getting the ick” is what we sometimes call being repulsed. A key aspect 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. At first, my ChatGPT dislike felt like a simple ick, a automatic 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 political choice. We are aware that the energy-intensive tech drains our water supply and increases electricity bills. It is sold as a placebo for real relationships; lonely, disconnected people discovering companionship or even falling in love with code is not as much a sci-fi scenario as it is just the way things go now. The megarich tech bros in charge of all this think in terms of profit first and people second.

OK, so ChatGPT assists you write your grocery list. Does your individual convenience justify the societal harm it can cause?

How ChatGPT Ruins Dating and Connection.

It seems ChatGPT has managed to make the romantic scene even more difficult. A good friend recently told me that she went out with a man, and in the morning proposed they get breakfast together. He pulled out his phone, accessed ChatGPT, and requested 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 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 profound, lasting connection with someone who regularly engages with a technology that’s kneecapping our shared attention spans and possibly heralding total apocalypse. Intellectual curiosity, originality, originality – I likely won’t find what I prize in someone who thinks “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] preference is truly serving your future goals.

According to Ali Jackson, a New York-based dating coach, she may use ChatGPT for specific tasks but is not promote it. 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 create everything on their dating apps – all the way down to the DMs they send. I inquired Jackson if my rule against ChatGPT users was too strict. 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 preference is truly 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 beliefs are aligned with yours.”

Others Who Share the AI Ick.

The dislike for AI extends beyond the dating sphere. 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 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 depend on an app for that,” she said.

A recent friend’s split was especially messy. She supported one of them after discovering the other turned to ChatGPT, a notoriously poor 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 process something and continue, which is not how things work.”

Before long, I found not handle it on my own. I had become too dependent on AI for even basic tasks.

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 don’t need to rely on it to make a grocery list. Your life is likely not that hard. We can make the list together.”

Celebrity and Industry Resistance.

Guillermo del Toro’s declaration that he’d “choose death” over using AI garnered significant attention. Similarly, SZA’s Instagram stories tirade 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 make statements that are critical of AI in their respective industries. I believe these quotes go viral for a reason: people agree with them.

This attitude exists even among those in the tech industry. Last month, Pinterest introduced a filter that lets users disable AI content. Meta lets users mute, but not entirely remove, 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.

{Luciano Noijeen, a lead software engineer based in Greece and the Netherlands, told me that he eagerly used AI in the past to write or enhance his coding.|According to Luciano Noijeen, a {lead|